3 SEO Tools That Will Rock Your World

by Krista Scarlett | Jul 11, 2017

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a never-ending online turf war, and that’s putting it mildly.

Regardless of size or industry, any business with a website plays a part in the online battle for search engine results page (SERPS) glory. It’s a game of keyword- and research-driven leapfrog made significantly more difficult by search engines like Google that change the rules of the game every few months by updating its algorithm. To stay ahead of Google and its updates, you need to monitor your keyword rankings, site performance, content structure, and a bevy of other tasks constantly.

How do you manage all of this? With SEO tools, of course.

SEO tools not only make life easier, but they also save time and money by making complex manual tasks automated and efficient. To figure out which tools fit your needs the best, you must determine your goals first. These can usually be summed up into three categories – keyword research, search position monitoring, and web crawling.

Once you’ve determined your goals, it’s easier to narrow in on the tool that makes sense for you. While there are more than 300 SEO tools available online, we’ll focus on our three favorites.

RavenTools

RavenTools is a digital marketer’s heaven. With its social media analytics, site analytics, paid search advertising monitoring, SEO capabilities, and advanced reporting features, this tool can do a little bit of everything well enough to give any specialized tool a run for its money. There’s a lot to learn with this tool, so we’ll focus on its SEO capabilities.

The site auditor feature is a leader among other site crawlers found online. The in-depth view it gives of your website’s performance both on the front- and back-end is where the real value lies. You simply enter in your website’s URL and wait a few minutes for a comprehensive report. The report is broken down into categories on front-end content, links, images, back-end code, and safety.

With all of the categories it covers, the report does an excellent job of pinpointing areas of weakness and improvement. You can see how well your site loads both on desktop and mobile through its integration with Google speed tests. No website project should be considered complete until it has been analyzed by RavenTools.

MOZ

If you’re looking for the most advanced and in-depth SEO tool on the market, look no further than MOZ. It not only provides a suite of SEO tools, but it’s also a leader in SEO education with its blog, training guides, and webinars. The tools that MOZ offers really set it apart from other SEO companies. Open Site Explorer is a top-notch site crawler complete with Google algorithm benchmarks to compare your site against.

Keyword Explorer is one of the most in-depth keyword tools on the market with its ability to show a keyword’s popularity, competition, value, opportunity, and search volumes. MOZ local provides a snapshot of your local SEO value through Google’s My Business profile and other business listing sites such as Yelp, Bing Places, Foursquare, and Yellow Pages. It’s difficult for any SEO tool on the market to match MOZ, let alone try and beat it.

SEO Yoast

This tool doesn’t compare to RavenTools or Moz. It doesn’t crawl your site, search keywords, or analyze your competitors – its only focus is improving your site’s SEO by giving you a platform to optimize it.

SEO Yoast is the leading WordPress plugin designed to enhance your site’s searchability through its easy-to-use interface. Its simplistic approach to SEO allows even the most inexperienced marketer to optimize a website. SEO Yoast is embedded into each webpage’s back-end and allows you to optimize it using a singular focused keyword.

Once you’ve established your focus keyword, you then complete the title, description, and URL by weaving in the focused keyword. It will notify you if you’ve successfully optimized the page by displaying a green light or a red or yellow light if those areas need more work. SEO Yoast is second to none when it comes to a tool that provides a platform for optimizing your website.