Despite what people want you to think, SEO is hard work and in order to be able to do it, you will need tools to get things done. Over the years, many tools have come and gone, tacking different aspects of SEO, some of them branching out and others sticking to their basic purpose.
It should be pointed out that different SEO companies use different tools and that the vast majority of companies will employ a variety of tools in order to get their job done.
The following are generally considered the best and the most popular tools that can truly be of huge help to SEO agencies, and which Cube SEO uses more or less regularly
Moz
Moz is without a doubt one of the more ubiquitous tools out there, or more precisely a set of tools, as they have grown dramatically over the years, finding new ways to help their customers.
For example, they still have one of the more powerful keyword research tools that can help SEO agencies find the keywords that will actually benefit their clients. They also feature an SEO Audit & Crawl tool, which enables agencies to run regular checks and crawls of their clients’ websites, identifying any problematic areas and providing suggestions on how to fix them. All of these can be done manually, but this would take huge amounts of time, especially for SEO companies with more than a few clients.
Moz is perhaps most famous for their immense index of billions of URLs and trillions of backlinks that can point you in the right direction, like for instance when SEO agencies do competitor analysis for their clients. They also have a set of tools that are aimed at SEO agencies which work with local clients.
Ahrefs
When we are talking tools that can give an SEO company a precise look at the state of a certain niche and individual websites that are doing well, we simply cannot fail to mention Ahrefs. Their crawlers are the busiest in the world and their index is as huge and as fresh as they come.
As a result, SEO companies happily use Ahrefs to research competition and their backlink portfolios. Obviously, this can help them with their own link building campaigns and also allow them to track how effective they have been since taking on a certain client.
Their content research tool is also respectable, even though it is not the most popular one on the market (we’ll soon cover the most popular one). Their content research tool is well-integrated with their backlink checker, which allows SEO companies to do even better link building campaigns for their clients.
Ahrefs also allows rank tracking and they feature a pretty good keyword research tool as well.
SEMRush
SEMRush has also been around for a while and they are the third “heavy-hitters” who provide entire sets of tools for SEO companies.
It should be pointed out that SEMRush expands its set of tools by allowing companies to see what their clients’ competition is doing with paid search as well, which can be of huge help for SEO companies that include paid search as part of their services. More recently, they have also added a couple of social media marketing weapons to their arsenal, making them an even more versatile solution.
They offer pretty much everything that their two aforementioned competitors have, while adding to it. They also have some interesting non-standard but useful tools in their tool-belt, such as domain vs. domain analysis, for example.
Google’s Set of Tools
While different SEO companies will lean towards one of the three aforementioned solutions to a certain extent, all of them will be using the tools provided by the Big Guy himself – Google.
Google Analytics is generally considered the basic SEO tool, since it provides information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to say. Google Analytics provides SEO companies all the pertinent information on their client’s website performance, especially when it comes to tracking visits and user behavior (internal search, bounce rate, most popular pages, etc.). It enables SEO companies to analyze mobile traffic, which is only going to grow in importance with time.
While Google Analytics has more to do with the behavior of website users, Google Search Console ensures that SEO companies have insight into and control over the more technical SEO aspects of the website – sitemap, robots.txt file, crawl rates, internal and external links, etc. Google Search Console helps Google get the best results from their crawlers and enables website owners and SEO experts to help Google get those results.
Google Keyword Planner is the third of the big triumvirate of Google’s SEO-oriented tools and while it may not have the more advanced options that Ahrefs’, Moz’ and SEMRush’s keyword research tools have, it can be just as powerful in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is the tool that was alluded to earlier in the article when content research was mentioned. BuzzSumo was developed as a content research tool and it still does it better than anyone else. It helps SEO companies identify the kind of content that will work for their clients and that they will have no trouble sharing and turning into clicks and links.
It provides features such as content curation, content insights, as well as brand monitoring and influencer marketing (which is becoming more and more important).
In short, anything content related – BuzzSumo’s got you covered.
A Plethora of Specialized Tools
Besides these comprehensive SEO tool sets, there is also a whole range of specialized software that helps with various aspects of an SEO company’s day-to-day life – from opportunity research to outreach, from broken backlink checkers to reporting tools and various tasks that the major players do too.
Even listing all of them would take up an article much longer than this and the best advice here is to do some more research.
There are some truly great tools out there.
