Over the years SEO tools come and go, some are great and others are a compete waste of time. Its difficult especially when starting out where should you spend your money to help your with SEO. So through the years I have tried a few and I always look for practicality and value for money.
The Best free SEO Tool
The first tool that is invaluable and free is Google Search Console. It gives you so many insights into how people find your website (although the data my be shrinking from google). All the data is there, you just to learn how to interpret the data and extract it in different ways. There is an excellent Google Sheets add on tool that extracts the data from google search console. It also allows you to extract more than a 1000 lines of data which search console is restricted too. Search analytics for sheets.
It allows you to return the search query and the page that it ranks, or shows impressions for. Especially helpful if you have any keyword cannibalisation issues. It is also useful for the 11 to 20 method as you can filter your ranking positions to show you what terms are just missing out on the page 1 ranking of google.
Tools For Reporting Data
Clients are king right, they pay the invoices which pay the bills so you have to show them something. Some clients like the little details, I have 1 client who barely looks at any data, as long as the traffic looks good, the phones keep ringing then they are happy. Some tools help measure where you are, what engagements you are getting and letting you know where your efforts are taking an impact. Not only useful justification for the clients, but yourself as well. You dont really want to channeling your efforts into tactics that don’t work.
One great tool for data is SEOTesting which is a fantastic tool by Nick Swan. At the moment I am only using it for the larger clients until I discover its full potential. I will be doing a full post on the benefits of SEOTesting.
Keyword Clustering
if you haven’t heard of keyword clustering tools then you probably haven’t been doing SEO very long or you are not keeping up with progress in the world of marketing find out more on Keyword Insights Clustering Tool
to be continued
Budget Keyword Tracking Software
Now probably everyone has heard of SEMrush, Ahrefs etc but are they worth the money compared o others ? Probably not, the Neil Patel Ubersuggest free version is pretty good and the low monthly plan gives value for money. I do have access to Ahrefs through a client and have been using it for around 2 years. However personally I have been using SE Ranking for a number of years and with the recent updates it is very impressive.
Doing all the jobs of the overpriced software tools out there and with fantastic value for money as well. to be continued
Reporting Software
I have just recently stumbled across Metricool and its fantastic the data it shows
Image Optimisation
As google is pushing for better user experience it its important that we don’t upload bloated images to our websites. This includes file size (kb/mb) and the physical size of the image as well. (Dimensions) One of the best plugins I have found over the years to compress images is Shortpixel. Sometimes when you take on a new client and they have hundreds or thousands of images its not possible to edit them all, so the solution is to instal the Shortpixel plugin and let that do the heavy work.
You can either have a monthly plan to keep optimising all your images as you go along, especially good if you have multiple sites.
There is also an option for just a one off payment to optimise your images.
