SEO is an ever-changing landscape with new tools being developed and released all the time. We use tools to check and track rankings, QA when our clients implement recommendations, find new opportunities, pivot strategy, and the list goes on. I don’t know a single person in the SEO field who doesn’t use tools, so we wanted to share our favorite tools with you.
SEO Tools
Power BI
- Data Analysis Tool
We use Power BI for a pretty large set of analyses. We leverage its ability to synthesize large data sets and find opportunities across many digital channels. It’s amazing how quickly you can test and confirm theories with a simple tweak of the criteria/variables. We are now finding insights in a matter of minutes that used to take days of data manipulation. We use Power BI to take the information we gather from other tools into one place where we get a holistic picture of the search landscape.
If you’re interested in getting started with Power BI, we have a few resources for you!
- How Power BI is Changing Everything We Do at Seer
- A Guide to Power BI: Big Data for Digital Marketers
- More Blog Posts to Help You With Power BI
STAT
- Keyword Tool
There are so many tools to help you track keyword rankings. We use STAT for a few reasons. This tool tracks keyword performance at an account level for defined keywords, domains, and competitors. We use this to track implementation and optimizations, as well as to call out future optimizations. We also use STAT in an ongoing capacity to analyze content opportunities and the competitive landscape around categories and keyword groupings.
STAT allows us to track performance against competitors with Share of Voice. STAT also allows us to track keywords on a daily basis. Instead of focusing on a specific keyword, we can tag keywords into a group so that we can track trends.
Screaming Frog
- Crawling and Technical SEO Tool
- Scraping Tool
Screaming Frog allows us to analyze the technical and architectural structure of a website. We use this to assist with technical audits, benchmarking, QA and confirmation of content and meta implementations, along with many other things. If you’d like to learn more about the tool, check out our Screaming Frog guide!
SEMrush
- Keyword Tool
- Competitor Insights Tool
SEMrush is probably one of the most common tools among SEOs. SEMrush allows us to see keywords we’re ranking for outside of tracked keywords. We use this tool to assist with benchmarking, to analyze competitors, monitor movement made at a holistic level, and even analyze PPC for competitors. There are so many ways to use SEMrush, so it’s definitely something to consider if you’re looking to expand your tool set. SEMrush is a paid tool set, but well worth it.
Moz
- Keyword Tool
- Backlink Tool
- Competitor Insights Tool
Moz is another tool provider that is pretty common in the world of SEO. You can use Moz for a variety of tasks, but we mainly use it to track linking domains to the client as well as competitors. We can also use this to monitor broken links, broken web pages, authority, etc. We can use Moz to supplement keyword research, as part of a Local SEO strategy, and so much more. At Seer, we typically use Moz on a monthly basis to help with reporting and also during the competitive analysis and quarterly reviews. Moz also has a Google Chrome extension that is helpful called, MozBar.
Ahrefs
- Keyword Tool
- Backlink Tool
- Competitor Insights Tool
Ahrefs is perhaps one of the best tools to monitor backlink performance. They’ve even added a new internal links feature that is great for identifying pages that could use some internal links. We use Ahrefs in similar way as Moz and SEMrush. As you can tell, we love our data, so we use Ahrefs to add color to Moz’s data and to help us with competitive analyses and PR/relationship monitoring.
Google Analytics & Adobe Analytics
- Measuring and Insights Tool
- Reporting Tool
Most marketers are familiar with Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. We can use these reporting tools to setup daily dashboards, report on progress and help to influence decisions including strategies and tactics to help track and hit our goal objectives. Google also offers a Google Chrome extension as well! Measuring ROI is incredibly important to us here at Seer, so we use these tools to help us measure performance and ROI. It helps that we have a kick-ass Analytics team.
Machine Learning
- Big Data Tool
Again, it’s no surprise that we love data at Seer. We leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze millions of data points in minutes—a task that would take a team of experts dozens of hours. While we only use this on an as-needed basis, we find a lot of value in our Data Strategy team and Data Engineers who make it possible for us to make the most of all of the data we can collect. Keep an eye out on our Seer Labs to stay up to date with everything we’ve got going on with big data.
Python
- Scraping Tool
- Automation Tool
Our team can leverage the speed and automation capabilities of Python to scrape, process and analyze millions of data points. This ability to scale enables us to look at the broad marketing landscape. This is another tool we use on an as-needed basis, but it’s a valuable asset to our teams.
Google Tag Manager/Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager/Tealium/Signal
- Measuring and Insights Tool
We leverage these tag managers to easily and efficiently deliver marketing/remarketing tags to websites, as well as implement tracking. Measuring success can sometimes be tricky for SEOs, but these tools help ease that burden (again with the help from our Analytics team).
BigQuery
- Big Data Tool
Big Query is Google’s fully managed, petabyte scale, low-cost enterprise data warehouse for analytics, which is especially useful for Google Analytics 360 accounts. This tool provides a low-cost way to query large data sets. We’re all about breaking down silos and working as one cohesive unit. This is one small part of how we do it.
Read more on BigQuery integrations
Optimize & Optimizely
- A/B Testing Tool
Optimize and Optimizely are experimentation platforms, which enable us to deliver continuous experimentation and personalization across websites and mobile apps.
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a tool that we leverage for reporting and data visualization. Google has been continuously updating this tool and adding new features. Our teams use Data Studio for weekly and monthly reporting, ad hoc reports, and basically any other time we need to visualize data from Google Analytics.
- Measuring & Insights Tool
- Reporting Tool
- Automation Tool
HotJar
- Measuring & Insights Tool
- Audience Insights Tool
- A/B Testing Tool
We love audience research for SEO as much as we love big data! We use HotJar to supplement our audience research. With HotJar, we can add polls to sites to gather quantitative data from customers, heatmaps to see how people are interacting with the site, and more.
Keywords Everywhere
- Keyword Research Tool
Keywords Everywhere is a helpful tool that integrates with SERPs to make keyword research a little easier and less time-intensive. This tool gives you average monthly search volume for a query and provides additional keywords that are relevant to the topic. The best part—you can export the Keywords Everywhere recommended keywords lists straight from the SERPs as well!
Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Keyword Research Tool
While Google Ads Keyword Planner tool is in the PPC toolset, we use it for SEO keyword research as well (which is pretty common practice). This tool allows you to find new keyword opportunities based on relevancy to a target term you add to the tool. It also provides you with historical metrics such as average monthly search volume by month (and average across the entire year).
Pro Tip: Add the keyword list you get from Keywords Everywhere into Google Ads Keyword Planner to get an updated MSV from a centralized tool (Keywords Everywhere is great, but not perfect).
What Are the Best SEO Tools?
Look, we know there are more tools out there, however, these are the tools that we use most frequently at Seer. Sometimes we’ll sprinkle in some additional tools if we think it will help us do our jobs better and make better recommendations for our clients. If there is a tool we didn’t mention that you think is worth exploring, share it with us in the comments section and let us know why you love it! We’d love to hear from ya!
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