Top 8 SEO Tools of 2018 {Updated}
I’m sure you have read about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in many articles of digital marketing before.
However, do website owners really understand how to maintain their pages up to date with the latest SEO techniques?
Working the SEO of your website has different stages, at its simple level involves finding out the keywords that your potential clients may enter into a search engine.
The next steps consist of discovering ways that your page can feature high on the results’ list.
I realize this could be a lot of work to do on your own.
For that reason, I’ve put together a list of the best SEO tools of 2018 that I use and think will make your life easier.
This becomes key when it comes time to optimize your website and rank higher in Search Engines.
These SEO tools will allow you to analyze key metrics for your pages such as keyword density, backlinks, and tags.
Apparently, the giant search engine wants to make everything easier for us. I think this could be a great SEO starter pack for beginners because it’s very easy to understand and you can count with live support anytime you don’t understand something.
One of the coolest tools of this pack is “Fetch as Google” because it lets you see URL’s in the same way as Google does.
In this manner, you can make the necessary modifications to improve the SEO in your page, reviewing the code to make sure your site has not been hacked.
Another great Google tool that I use all the time is “PageSpeed Insights”. It’s one of my favorites because it lets you perform speed tests in both desktop and mobile versions of your website, which is a vital key to rank higher.
Use the “structured data testing tool” to check that your data has been inputted correctly. The tool is constantly validating your site to assure that it works with the right format.
This is a very complete tool because includes daily rank checking of keywords, website audit, and competitor analysis.
It works with unlimited domains, with both automatic and custom reporting. The tool is very accurate with a friendly interface and it has a very dynamic dashboard where you can evaluate the performance of your website at any moment.
It’s a great tool to generate reports in PDF, XLS, and CSV format, being a great option if you are launching a website project with a team!
I would recommend this tool for those website owners who are more familiarized with everything involved in the SEO context.
This platform offers advanced tools and it uses complex terminology, so you need to be well informed if you want to get the most out of them.
You don’t want to pay for something that you won’t even know how to manage, do you?
What I love the most about this one is the fact that all of the tools are accessible from an intuitive and informative dashboard.
Some of its features include:
- A keyword research tool: you can get access to keyword detailed analysis reports as well as a summary of the domains you manage.
- Comparison feature: it lets you check how your page is ranking in comparison with your competitors. You can even analyze the quality and authenticity of backlinks from other websites to yours.
- Traffic Analytics: it allows you to identify the top referring sites of your competitors, which will give you useful data about the average session duration and bounce rates of your website and your competitors’.
- Domain overview: besides providing a summation of your competitors’ SEO strategies, you can also check their targeted keywords and view the relative performance of your domain in different devices.
This tool is very interesting because it works with a micro survey function that will help you know what your visitors are thinking.
It’s perfect to optimize your efforts and improve your Conversion Rate results because it lets you to understand what your market needs and thinks in order to direct your content marketing into the right track.
Its core features include:
- Checkbox Survey.
- Email Notifications.
- Mobile Responsive.
- Short Text Survey.
- Radio Button Survey.
- Net Promoter Score.
- Qualitative Survey.
As its behavioral features, I would highlight things like:
- Exit-intent: it shows your survey at the exact moment when someone is about to leave your website in the manner that you can study the reason for their lack of engagement.
- Scrolling Behavior.
- Survey Display Frequency.
- Scheduled Surveys.
- Skip Logic: it some user leaves your site with an unfinished survey, when they step back to your site, they will continue where they left off.
For its acquisition functions, I have:
- Auto Redirect to answer: according to the answer they give to a specific survey, you can redirect them to the page you want.
- Traffic Targeting
- Remove Branding
- Device Visibility
This awesome tool has a free version but it’s limited to small websites.
However, using it in a first place can give you a clear idea about its advantages, allowing you to familiarize better with all the SEO terminology.
Besides, it gives you a wider scope of the multiple possibilities you can get for the paid version.
Leaders in SEO use this tool because it has excellent crawling features.
It also performs a quick search of friendly URL’s. This is great because it supports in the fact that search engines are more likely to index those URL’s that are simple, relevant and human readable. This tends to take presidence over the ones that are just a group of characters with no sense.
SEO Spider also detects if there are broken pages in your website, which saves you time and effort of manually clicking each link to rule out the popularly hated “404 errors”.
It also checks if any of your pages don’t have a title tag, contains duplicated meta tags or they don’t have the appropriate length. In general, it will let you know about any aspect that is not in line with SEO practices.
Another important aspect of this tool is the fact that monitors the number of links you place on each page to avoid the common but poor SEO practice of having too many.
An excess of links confuses visitors to your site because it’s distracting, motivating them to go elsewhere instead of staying in your website, reading your content or purchasing your products.
I also need to mention that Google ranks down websites with over 100 out links.
This is one of the most effective and accurate keyword-tracking tools you can find in the market.
I recommend it because it provides up-to-date rankings of a wide keywords’ variety for each website you handle.
This tool has access to Google Analytics data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a SEO strategy and generate valuable reports about it.
It also includes backlink trackers and competitors’ analysis, so this is a highly recommended rank-tracking tool.
If you are a backlink tinkerer, you will love this tool because it’s a very sophisticated and useful proposal for these matters.
It has an excellent reputation because, since its inception in 2011, it has received praises from SEO veterans, making it one of the most important and former SEO tools still available.
Majestic SEO Tools focus specialty is related to the fact that they manage a huge amount of backlink data.
If you are not familiarized with this marketing term, know that backlinks are those links that connect a website to another different one.
As a user of this tool, you can make two types of search:
- A Fresh Index: it’s crawled and updated throughout the day.
- A Historic Index: it has been praised online for its lighting retrieval speed.
Discover one of the most popular features of this tool; “The Majestic Million” because it shows a ranking of the top 1 million websites.
In addition, the “Site Explorer” feature will show you an overview in case that your online company receives negative comments because it looks dated.
If you are interested in the Lite Version of this tool, you will enjoy these features:
- Bulk backlink checker.
- Record of referring domains, IP’s and subnets.
One of the main advantages of this tool is the fact that is free, easy to install and it counts with a simple and understandable dashboard.
The same team that manages the SEMrush toolkit develops the SEOQuake tool.
It’s very easy to download and you can install it as a Google Chrome Extension or as an add-on for Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
One of its strongest features is related to the ability to assess both internal and external links, elaborating detailed comparisons of your site against your competitors’.
Also the dashboard is very simple to use, you can assess easily the entire data.
Another valuable function you will enjoy is the SEO audit feature, which is capable of generating a keyword density report, calculating them as a percentage of the overall text.
SEOQuake doesn’t forget about social metrics because it analyzes them in all your domains and landing pages, including Google Index, Alexa Rank, and Facebook “likes”.
If you want an even more sophisticated version of this tool, you will have to pay for the SEMrush kit that includes more advanced and technical features.
As you can see, even when these are all SEO tools, you will find that some of them have more complexity and important features.
In order to get the most out of them one and identify which one fits best with your purposes, budget, and needs, you need to have a basic knowledge of SEO technics and terms.
For this purpose, you can get a detailed and personalized advice from FinePoint Design where we can help solve all your concerns and doubts to help you find the best complement that gives you the most opportune information to take the best decisions for your company’s SEO strategy!