Best SEO Tools to use in 2019

SEO tools are everywhere at the moment and the benefits of SEO are crucial in todays businesses. If you work within SEO, chances are you’ve come across many tools on the Internet promising to help you rank the highest. But which are the best SEO tools that really work in helping you achieve a successful Search Engine Optimisation strategy? Are you looking for the top paid SEO tools or the best free SEO tools?

What are the best SEO Tools to Use this year? - Some of the Best SEO Tools to date

SEM Rush

With different account levels, SEM Rush offers many different features. The tool can help not only organically; but it can also help with paid traffic, social media and PR.

Focusing on organic SEO services features, SEM Rush is great for tracking keywords, annotating keyword tracking graphs and staying organised with multiple SEO campaigns. It offers a website audit feature, scanning websites for all health issues allowing you to quickly get your website squeaky clean and free of any errors. Another great feature is the ‘On Page SEO Checker’. The tool has the ability to scan the top 10 search results for given keyword(s), providing you with feedback on all on-page elements and content on those webpages.

Overall, the SEM Rush tool is brilliant and certainly one we use daily here at PS for our clients. There are far too many features to list at once, it is an incredibly sophisticated tool with much to offer. There are also a few downsides to SEM Rush because of the vast amount of features, it has taken our SEO expert team a great deal of time to become SEM Rush black belts. Because of all these features it is essential to dedicate time for learning how they work and the best ways to optimise your website. It is worth noting that the tool can be expensive, it is built for agencies looking after multiple accounts.

AHref’s

AHref’s boasts many useful features for SEO. These fabulous features include: the Site Explorer, Keyword Explorer, Content Explorer, Rank Tracker, Site Audit, Alerts and the SEO Toolbar.

Similar to SEM Rush, the AHref’s tool offers many useful features that can help you organise and shape your SEO campaigns. AHref's is best known for its fantastic ability to analyse a website’s backlink portfolio which is extremely useful not only when auditing your own backlink portfolio, but also to spy on competitors and gain insight into what backlinks they have acquired. Alongside SEM Rush, AHref’s can be a valuable tool to gain outstanding results for you and your clients websites as backed by industry expert Brian Deane:

"When it comes to backlink analysis, Ahrefs is my #1 go-to tool. I've tested 25 link analysis tools and none comes close to Ahrefs in terms of index size, freshness and overall usability. If you're serious about SEO, you need Ahrefs." - Brain Dean - Founder of Backlinko.

Here at PS, we also use AHref’s daily to check our campaigns and keep up to speed with our clients competitors. Similar to SEM Rush, Ahref’s can be very expensive if you are just looking after your own website but would work better for agencies looking after multiple campaigns. As mentioned, Ahref’s offers many specialist features and in capable hands, this tool is indispensable.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog has been rated one of the best tools to use for SEO by many agencies, mainly due to its ability to audit an entire domain. It is praised for its in-depth reporting, ability to crawl thousands of sites and pages both internally and externally and its ability to configure to Google Analytic and Search Console. Screaming Frog has an added bonus in that they provide a quick and helpful customer service and support team that are reachable on relevant social media platforms to answer queries.

It does however require a massive amount of training to use this SEO tool. It can be described as not visual and it can be very time consuming to prepare reports one at a time and export. Unlike other top rated SEO tools, it will not prepare an audit document that is presentation/ client ready - Screaming Frog will give you the raw data. Here at PS we use Screaming Frog to audit our clients domains and to cross reference data with other SEO tools.

SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a fantastic extension to use when performing SEO activities, as it automatically checks domains whilst you work. As you are browsing the Internet you can see with minimum effort useful aspects such as: the websites metadata, header tag structure, the keyword density of the content and much more. The major benefit of SEO Quake is its speed, there is no scanning time, no need to set up projects either. Its quick, free and something we use with all websites that we analyse.

SEO Quake’s main benefits are that it is quick and easy to use. We use SEO Quake here at PS alongside other tools to optimise our clients websites. The tool provides quick access to some on-page elements, but isn’t the full and only package. Whilst it is useful for some things, it will need to be used alongside other SEO small tools for a successful SEO campaign.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an essential and of course named on our list of best SEO tools to use. Its free, easy to set up and provides exact statistics for your website’s traffic. Using Google Analytics you can: analyse your website’s traffic easily, compare date ranges which easily allows you to see direct improvements and sudden drops in traffic, The depth the tool can allow you to go into is remarkable. From being able to see which pages are most popular on your website to being able to see the drop off statistics in your visitors buying cycle. Google Analytics is used for all of our clients and is also checked on a regular basis, it is a must have for all website owners.

Other great features of Google Analytics include tasks such as the ability to check on the traffic data to your website, to being able to set up in depth conversion tracking on your website. These in depth tools have great potential and specialists can use the tool to track almost anything on a website.

It is also worth mentioning the other excellent Google tools available. Such as Google Adwords and Google Search Console. Google Adwords is a highly powerful platform used for Pay-Per-Click management. The data that is collected from a Pay-Per-Click campaign can have a huge influence on an SEO campaign. Unlike with SEO, you are able to record key statistics based around keywords which can help shape your SEO campaign hugely.

A direct benefit of Google Search Console is by using it, you are able to see insight from Google as to how search engines see your website. This tool enables you to check for errors, broken links, check site indexing and even receive warnings of hack attempts to your website.

There are many different SEO Tools available, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Overall, to gain great results with SEO we’d recommend getting an SEO expert. Our in-house specialists are ready help you achieve your SEO goals so why not come in for a coffee and hear more about search engine optimisation what we can do for you. Talk to a member of our team today.

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