SEO Tools Used By The Experts
Have you ever wondered which tools the experts use for SEO? How are they finding the information to create award-winning strategies for enterprise-level clients? How can I find keywords that will drive more qualified leads to convert on my site?
If these sound like questions you have asked yourself in the past, then look no further. Our highly skilled SEO experts have curated their recommendations for the best SEO tools and compiled them into this list! We will provide you with 10 SEO tools that our team uses nearly every day, a description of each tool, and a tip from the professionals.
Disclosure: We only endorse things we’ve personally used or come highly recommended by trusted peers. If you grab anything we mention with a referral link, we may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Seer Interactive has pledged to donate 100% of these referral commissions to organizations like Spark, Think Dignity, Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, and more. Check out our Community page to learn about other ways we give back. Please don’t spend any money on these tools unless you believe they will help you achieve your goals.
Why Choosing The Right SEO Tool Is Important?
If you’ve ever tried to put together a dresser from IKEA using the little tools provided in the box, then you may understand why having a good set of tools on hand can save you a lot of time and money (or, in the case of the dresser, agony, and tears).
Hundreds of different SEO tools are available today, and many offer similar features. This can make it challenging to know which tools can help you reach your SEO goals.
Our team created this list of the best SEO tools on the market to remove that challenge. These recommendations have been vetted by the experts at Seer Interactive and are used by our team on a daily basis. With this list of SEO tools, you will be able to check and track rankings, QA when our clients implement recommendations, find new opportunities, pivot strategies, and so much more.
We hope these tools will lead to exceptional results that can save you time and generate more organic traffic.
Without further ado, let’s dive into our list of the best SEO tools!
10 SEO Tools To Increase Organic Traffic
Google Search Console
You can’t spell Search Engine without G-O-O-G-L-E! We obviously had to start with the elephant in the room because Google still dominates the search engine market in the United States. Google Search Console (GSC) provides information gathered by Google’s crawlbot and details extremely accurate keyword data for your site. We recommend checking on your website in GSC regularly to watch for any issues your site may be experiencing and to utilize the URL Inspection Tool for detailed information on specific pages.
Our very own Meghan Evans, SEO Manager at Seer, says, "one of the most valuable aspects of this tool is the ability to check indexing status.” This will help you know which pages have been indexed, if there are any errors with indexing your site, what your crawl budget looks like, and so much more.
This is a free SEO tool that anyone can use to monitor their domain’s search optimization.
Learner’s Resource: Starter Guide to Google Search Console
Google Analytics
But wait, there’s more! That’s right, Google offers more tools to help track your SEO efforts and take advantage of your site’s data. The information you can find within Google Analytics (GA) includes details on who is visiting your site, how much traffic you are receiving, what your visitors are doing while on your site, what the user journey looks like from search to purchase, and much more!
This tool grants you access to Google’s machine learning capabilities to dive deep and make the most of your data. We use GA to set up daily dashboards, report on progress, and help to influence decisions, including strategies and tactics to help track and hit our goal objectives.
Google’s latest version of this tool is Google Analytics 4, and you can learn more about it in our guide for GA4 FAQs.
(Image Source: marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/)
Semrush
(Affiliate Link)
SEMrush is one of the most popular tools used by SEO professionals. This tool lets you view keywords you rank for outside your tracked keywords. We use this tool to assist with benchmarking, analyze competitors, monitor movement made at a holistic level, and even analyze PPC for competitors.
This SEO SaaS platform offers over 50 tools to optimize your site for search engines and allows you to get measurable results from online marketing campaigns. SEMrush aims to be a one-stop-shop when it comes to digital marketing and provides tools beyond your average SEO offering. They offer tools for keyword research, on-page SEO, competitor analysis, content marketing, social media management, paid advertising, competitor PR monitoring, and so much more!
With all this platform offers, we thought it would be helpful to create a guide to SEMrush so you can maximize your time and effort.
[TIP]
When using SEMrush, you will often rely on adding filters to achieve very specific results. Filters are added on top of each other, so if two filters are applied, the results will meet the criteria for Filter 1 AND Filter 2, not Filter 1 OR Filter 2.
In most cases, you can change a filter from “include” to “exclude” and find the opposite of what you’re looking for. Any of this can be performed in Excel, but using SEMrush’s built-in functionality saves time and saves you from downloading enormous Excel files (which also preserves your download limit).
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another all-in-one online SEO tool offering its users over 40 tools to find the digital marketing information they need. They are considered one of the best backlink analysis tools in the world and have been building their backlink index for over a decade.
This SEO platform strives to offer a powerful toolset used by SEO experts worldwide yet make it easy enough for junior marketers to master. Our team utilizes Ahrefs for keyword research, finding backlink and outreach opportunities, and finding organic search opportunities. Through the Ahrefs Dashboard tool, you can get a high-level overview of all of your projects and track their SEO progress in a quick and simple view.
[TIP] Reverse engineer a competitor site in your niche using Ahrefs “Best by links’ growth” to identify content opportunities for promotional strategies.
For more helpful tips like this, check out these 3 Ahrefs features we love at Seer!
Screaming Frog
If you are looking for a tool for link crawling or full site scraping, look no further than Screaming Frog. This tool is one of our team’s favorites for crawling site links and analyzing a website's technical and architectural structure.
Our Technical SEO team uses this software to assist with technical audits, benchmarking, QA, and confirmation of content and meta implementations. Screaming Frog has evolved over the years to offer a whole suite of features to conduct technical audits, check a site’s health, or simply get a quick glimpse of info on a selection of URLs.
Another excellent use for the Screaming Frog SEO Spider is for competitive analysis. Whether you are looking for what anchor text your competitors use for internal linking or which pages your competitor values most, you can use this tool to find just that.
Our team loves this tool so much that we put together a Screaming Frog guide to doing almost anything!
Moz Pro
Another major player in the SEO community is Moz, with its deep toolset to optimize your site. Some of the SEO solutions you can achieve with this SEO software include site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, keyword research, and more. This highly-accurate link tool lets you check the backlink profile and Domain Authority of any site.
You can use Moz for various tasks, but our team of SEO professionals mainly uses it to track linking domains to the client and competitors.
[TIP]
Moz keeps a list of likely and confirmed Google algorithm updates you can review if you believe your sight may have been affected by an update.
(Image Source: moz.com)
KWFinder
(Affiliate Link)
When it comes to researching keywords, look no further than KWFinder! This online SEO tool allows you to dig deeper into which keywords you should target to drive targeted traffic. With features such as keyword difficulty ranking, competitor keyword analysis, local keyword research, and historical search volume data, this is a fan favorite within the Seer team!
This tool is focused on simplicity with its incredible user interface and innovative design. Beyond the user experience, the keyword research that KWFinder provides is actually really good!
We use KWFinder when our team is looking for keywords with specific parameters. Whether looking for keywords targeting a specific storefront or keywords that are growing in usage, this is our team’s go-to tool.
(Image Source: KWFinder.com)
Power BI
Power BI is a business analytics tool from Microsoft that combines multiple datasets to create interactive visualizations that can be used in reports or dashboards. This tool is an incredibly powerful reporting and data visualization tool that our team uses every single day to analyze big data.
Big data describes extremely large datasets that are typically too large for a traditional data management tool (like Excel) to deal with. The advantages to using big data for search marketing are that it allows you to find opportunities by combining different types of data, gives you organization-specific best practices vs. industry level, grants you more accurate views for data-driven decisions, and much more.
The team here at Seer uses Power BI every single day to weed through the data to find golden nuggets of information that help transform our client’s digital marketing strategy to the next level. We created a detailed guide to Power BI if you are interested in learning how to utilize this incredible tool!
Serpstat
(Affiliate Link)
Another competitor in the all-in-one SEO platform space that we use is Serpstat. With more than 30 tools for SEO and PPC professionals, this toolset grants you access to all the information you need to improve your organic and paid traffic!
We really love the Keyword Trends tool offered by Serpstat to get a list of the most popular searches for a specific region. This tool gives our team access to a month’s worth of keyword trend data to analyze the performance of a list of terms. We can quickly find any keywords that are being used more frequently over a span of time to give our clients up-to-date details on what to include in their content.
With everything you need under one platform, Serpstat is a great tool to keep in your SEO toolbox!
(Image source: Serpstat.com)
AnswerThePublic
Last but definitely not least, we have AnswerThePublic. This online tool is a keyword data visualization tool that helps you uncover ideas for content by organizing your keywords into categories that consist of the question words (who, what, when, where, why, etc.)
As you know, users often use Google’s search engine as a magic lamp to ask questions of the genie inside. AnswerThePublic helps you understand which questions are being most often asked around specific topics so you can know which answers you should provide.
It’s a great tool to identify the questions you may not know are being asked around your products or services and will help you to connect with your audience more deeply.
We hope these tools shine as bright for you as they have for us!
Again, we use each and every one of these tools to accomplish the amazing results we have achieved for our clients. There are hundreds of other tools that can be utilized for SEO and we encourage you to find the ones that work for you!
With the toolset provided in this list, we believe that you will be armed with some of the best platforms and tools available to uncover your organization's hidden gems in the digital marketing space.
Looking For More Info on Seer?
If you’re looking for more of what we do and how we do it – keep exploring the Seer blog or contact us!
Already familiar with these tools? Already a kick-ass digital marketer? We want to hear from you! Check out our current openings.
Sign up for our newsletter for more posts like this in your inbox:
