Successful websites have their search engine optimisation, or SEO marketing as we call it, down to a tee. They use the best keywords, they keep any eye on their competitors and know where they need to focus their efforts. It can be tricky though, especially for newbies. Luckily, there are plenty of superb SEO tools out there to help you on your way. In the meantime, here is a brief overview of what we, an SEO marketing agency think are some of the best SEO tools of 2018.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a highly recommended SEO tool by webmasters all over the world, and after Google itself, it’s possibly the largest website crawler out there. It can assess your website and highlight the areas that require improvement to increase your ranking, as well as letting you take a look at your competitor’s backlinks. There is also an option to find the content in your niche that is most linked to.
2. Moz
This has always been a popular one for SEO people. It has a whole host of tools and features to help you improve your rankings. The free package is useful but does have some limitations – we certainly recommend upgrading to the paid packages to help you with keyword recommendations and site crawls. Handily, it can be downloaded as a Chrome extension so you can see the data for every website that you visit.
3. SEMRush
This is another popular SEO tool, which enables you to access your ranking easily, and gives you tips and tricks on what changes to make to improve it. Tools such as Domain V Domain let you compare your competitor’s website to yours, and provides you with detailed information about search data and traffic.
4. KWFinder
One of the most important things in SEO is keywords, and getting them right. This particular tool helps you to find low competitive long tail keywords. The Rank Tracker tool enables you to determine your ranking and track your improvement, as well as giving you ideas for new keywords.
5. Majestic
On Majestic, you can see the ranking of the top million websites by using their Majestic Million feature. There is also the option to see a general overview of your website and the number of backlinks that you have. Also included is a SEO keyword tool, to help you find and use the best keywords.
6. SEOQuake
This is a great tool, which can be downloaded as a browser extension. You’re able to look at both the internal and external links to your website, as well as perform in-depth comparisons against your competitors. You are also able to compile keyword density and social metric reports.
7. Quantcast
This is often used for tracking marketing tags and insights into the demographics, lifestyles and behaviours of the visitors to your site. The paid version gives you more detailed information, and allows you to monitor your competitors, as long as they are registered in the Quantcast database.
8. Alexa
Alexa lets you to delve further into and compare similar sites to yours on an international scale, and gives you an insight into both paid and organic keyword data, see your competitors advertising methods, their social media influence and exposure,, search data, and regional rankings.
9. SpyFu
SpyFu, as the name suggests, is a great way to monitor the website activities of your competitors. The free version allows you see the number of times a keyword gets searched for each month as well as determining how easy or difficult it is to rank for that keyword. You can also carry out some research on your competitors to see which keywords they use, how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get and the ads they created on Google Adwords.
10. Google Webmaster
The giant of search engine optimisation itself – Google. We couldn’t really leave this one off the list! This is one of the best tools to use if you are new to the language and world of SEO. A really useful feature is ‘Fetch as Google’, which allows you to look at websites in the same way Google does. This makes it easier for you to see where you need to improves SEO, and take measures to sort it out. Site speed checks also give you the opportunity to see how quickly your page loads for users on both mobile and desktop.
Don’t have the time or expertise to do your own SEO? Why not consider outsourcing your SEO to us? Contact us today to find a package that suits your needs.
