At SEO Outsourcing Company we deal with large volumes of SEO projects and campaigns and, in order to help streamline the various processes that are involved, we utilise a number of different tools.
Checking the ranking for one page over hundreds of keywords can prove extremely time-consuming with hundreds of pages belonging to hundreds of sites and for hundreds of different customers, it would prove impossible to perform many of the tasks that we need to undertake.
Below are some of the best tools we have found to assist in ethical search optimisation campaigns; some of them are commercial products and carry a charge but others are completely free to use.
The first few are paid software services that we subscribe to, there is one Excel plugin and the rest are used within the browser – either Firefox or Chrome.
Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is actually a massive SEO toolkit that provides detailed information on various aspects of an SEO campaign. Primarily, it offers a link map that shows how pages are linked to one another throughout the web which can provide an invaluable means of assessing a particular website’s link profile and domain authority.
Your website link profile is a measure of the number and authority of links pointing to your website. Seeing how pages link from and to one another can provide you with an ideal means of visualising your link profile which will ultimately help you to improve your link profile.
Moz Free Tools
More Free SEO Tools from Moz · Keyword Explorer · Free Competitive Research · Link Explorer · MozBar · My Online Presence · Free Domain Analysis · MozCast. Best free SEO tools for link building and analysis, keyword research, webpage performance, local listing audits, and more! You Can check domain authority, page authority, Mozrank, spam scores and backlinks
Raven Tools
Raven Tools is another suite of search optimisation tools and one that offers a comprehensive set of data taken from various different sources. It enables us to be able to view and analyse position, keyword, and link data on any domain and it also integrates with other platforms including Google’s Analytics program.
What’s particularly great about Raven Tools is the level of access and management control it provides. SEO is all about collaboration and not only can we easily share information with our team but we can produce extensive, informational reports to help keep our clients up to date with every bit of information pertaining to a particular client site.
Screaming Frog
Search engines access and navigate websites differently to human users. They follow text links and ignore those links where access is denied whether this denial is intentional or unintentional. Screaming Frog is a crawling tool that accesses a given domain and then crawls all of the site’s content and pages in order to identify potential problems and provide a detailed analysis of a website’s content.
Broken links and the incorrect usage of website data can cause major problems in an SEO campaign and one method of resolving this is to use Screaming Frog and analyse on-page elements. We find this tool extremely useful when analysing a new site or attempting to highlight reasons for poor page performance.
Ahrefs
With Ahref site explorer you can track your search engine ranking position while tracking which pages are being indexed by the search engines. This handy tool isn’t free but for the money, you are able to track a lot of data regarding the search optimisation and search positions of your site over a long period of time too.
Ahrefs is also useful as a competitor analysis tool, offering a domain comparison service so that you can see how well your own site is performing compared to those of the competition.
SEO Plugin For Excel
SEO Plugin for Excel is a free plugin that adds extensive search optimisation functionality to your installation of Excel. Not only is this tool free (although the developers do appreciate donations) but it is a high powered and highly beneficial way of monitoring your performance and the important elements of your website.
Another potential use of the SEO Plugin for Excel is as a means of creating powerful reports for your website. You can use the array of functions provided in order to view metadata, link profile data, and duplicate content, as well as PageRank, Alexa Raking and more. This means that you can create your own SEO site scoring spreadsheets to enhance your optimisation results and provide reports to clients.
Nodofollow For Firefox – addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nodofollow/
This is another free tool and while the Nodofollow add-on is a simple little tool it is also a highly beneficial one. It can be used to highlight whether the links on a particular web page are dofollow or nofollow so that you can assess the value of a potential link page or so that you can check your own internal linking structure.
You will not gain the same benefit from a nofollow link as you would from a dofollow link. When considering blogs and other sites to place content links and other types of links we use this SEO tool to ensure that we concentrate on those links that provide real benefit; another means of viewing a website in a similar way to a search engine spider.
SEO Inspector
SEO Inspector scans the active page and applies a set of customizable rules to its contents. The results of the scan are displayed on a simple, elegant interface for manual inspection.
SEO Inspector is another free tool that is available as an add-on for Firefox. The add-on is effectively an SEO analysis tool that measures many factors concerning your existing optimisation campaign. It will score your website and provide recommendations to help improve your SEO score and, therefore, your search engine position.
Scoring is a popular technique that is used to identify the current performance for a website and is further used to identify areas for potential improvement. By improving your score you are also improving your potential for greater search engine ranking positions.
Rank Checker
Yet another SEO Tool that will prove invaluable to your search optimisation campaign. Your search ranking may not be the single most important metric that you can measure but it is an important one nevertheless. The higher your ranking the more likely that you will enjoy increased traffic levels.
Rank Checker not only tells you where your web pages appear but it gives you a history of your position so that you can see improvements and monitor for any unexpected drop in your ranking position.
SEMRush
Semrush is a SaaS platform. It is often used for keyword research and online ranking data, including metrics such as search volume and cost per click. The platform also collects information about online keywords gathered from Google and Bing search engines.
Megri Tools
More than 100 free web tools online – SEO tools, design, hosting, text, keywords, social, domain, IP, Programming, PPC, link and apps tools and resources. Free Web Tools. All are Free and best for small businesses and SEOs
Have Your Say
There are literally thousands of add-ons, plug-ins, and standalone SEO tools and applications that can be used to help monitor your SEO performance and provide you with analysis and information. Above are a selection of those that we use regularly to deal with our clients’ optimisation campaigns.
Do you agree with our selection or are there other tools that you can’t live without?
Let us know in the comments below.