SEO has become important for every website irrespective of the business size or industry. Spending on search engine optimization services in the US is forecast to reach $80 billion by the end of 2020.
However, it’s almost impossible to do SEO without the right tools that allow you to make data-backed decisions and analyze your performance in real-time.
Here are five SEO tools that you have to try to drive better results for your website.
1- Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a freemium tool that helps you find the right keywords you should optimize your site for. You can see each keyword’s monthly search volume, check your website’s traffic, its top keywords, and pages. Ubersuggest is an excellent alternative to pricey SEO tools that offer pretty much the same data.
Recently, Ubersuggest launched three new features:
- Devices used to search: It shows how many searches are taking place from mobile or desktop devices for a specific keyword.
- The number of people clicking on search results: Displays how many people are clicking on any links, including organic and paid results.
- Searcher’s age range: It shows what age group of people is searching for your target keywords.
These features are extremely helpful for marketers as they will be able to pick the right keywords that their target audience is searching for.
The Site Audit feature in Ubersuggest lets you find issues in your website that might be holding it back. It categorizes errors in different categories depending on its impact on your SEO.
2- SEOQuake
SEOQuake is a free browser plugin that equips you with organic research data for any domain at the click of a button.
SEOQuake displays metrics like Alexa Rank, SEMrush Rank, the number of indexed pages by major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Baidu, and Bing), estimated traffic, and backlinks.
What I liked the most about SEOQuake is its link examiner. It shows the number of backlinks, including subdomain and root domain links.
As soon as you click on any of the numbers, it will redirect you to the SEMrush platform, where you can check the type of backlink (text, image, form, or frame) and the attributes (follow, no follow, sponsored, UGC).
3- MediaScale
MediaScale is a great tool to run SEO and link building campaigns at scale.
It integrates with Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush, SimilarWeb, and Alexa to generate outreach lists based on your desired SEO metrics and creates a website database that is updated regularly.
The platform enables you to produce comprehensive reports showing total links acquired for clients, link type and anchor text breakdown and has website filtering features that help you find the websites you’re most interested in.
MediaScale shows all the vital metrics related to your SEO campaigns, including total income, expenses, profit, status, and website URL in one place so it’s particularly useful for SEO agencies and link building freelancers.
Another feature that I liked in MediaScale is its headline analyzer which is useful for content marketing campaigns.
It provides your headline with a score from 0-100 (with 0 being the lowest and 100 being the highest). It also categorizes the terms you use in your title into power, common, and uncommon words. This helps ensure your headline is effective.
MediaScale’s outreach and pitching tools can help you find reporters and land media coverage easily, allowing you to scale your link building efforts.
4- Hunter.io
Hunter.io is yet another great tool for digital marketers that help find email addresses of professionals across companies. Simply enter a website URL, and Hunter will return with contact details of people working in the organization.
This is extremely helpful for marketers looking to contact webmasters for guest blogging or partnership.
The green badge beside the email address indicates that it is verified and working. For the ones that are not confirmed, you will see a circle along with a tick.
You can also search for a specific person’s email in a company. For example, I first typed “nike.com” in the Hunter search bar. Then I entered the name “Michael Spillane” in the box below domain search. The tool returned with Michael’s email address.
One of the best features of Hunter.io is that it allows you to perform bulk searches as well. For example, if you want to find email addresses from a list of companies, all you have to do is enter the domain names or upload a file (CSV, Excel, Numbers, or TXT).
You can also set filters, such as maximum email addresses for each domain, email addresses type (generic and personal), and the department (executive, marketing, HR, sales, etc.) for bulk searches.
5- Majestic
Majestic is a backlink intelligence tool. Majestic has the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world.
With Majestic, you can easily determine which sites are ideal for your backlink campaigns. It provides a “Trust Flow Score” to each website. You can see which genres are the best for any domain.
For example, BBC UK has a Trust Flow score of 90. It is ideal for weather or internet broadcast companies. However, if you are in the music or law industry, BBC UK is not a perfect site for you to get a backlink from.
You can also check the backlink profile of any website. It includes the total number of backlinks, referring domains, IPs, and subnets.
Majestic is perfect for spying on your competitor’s backlinks. You can check their top inbound links, filter it by topic, quality, language, or anchor text.
Majestic’s “Clique Hunter” feature allows you to find websites that are linking to your competitors. You can enter up to ten different domains, and the tool will return with a list of low hanging fruits for link building.
Final Verdict
Whether you are getting started with digital marketing or are an expert, SEO tools are a must. I personally like Ubersuggest the most because it provides almost everything you need for SEO for free.
Hunter is yet another tool that I like. Hunter makes it easier to find contact details of website owners, supporting the guest blogging activities. Which is your favorite tool in the list? Let me know in the comments!
