3 SEO Tools That You Can't Live Without

I constantly see “How-to” posts when it comes to the subject of SEO. These posts are great, but most of them don’t point out the amount of tools needed to be successful in the SEO business. SEO tools are commonly used to gather data, target customers, and help you find opportunities to help you beat your competition.

Some of these tools are free while others you have to pay for on a monthly basis. Either way, it would be practically impossible to complete a lot of SEO tasks without them. With that in mind, I’ve decided to come up with a list of 3 tools that I couldn’t go a day without.

1. The Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

The Adwords Keyword Planner is easily one of my favorite SEO tools, and the fact that it’s free puts the icing on the cake. Although it was primarily designed for Pay Per Click (PPC), this tool can be used for almost any aspect of SEO.

The Keyword Planner allows you to research keywords based on a product, service, landing page, or product category. It will also tell you the level of competition and the average monthly searches for a specific keyword, which is extremely valuable to any SEO project.

The Keyword Planner is also very useful for content creation and can be used to group lists of keywords into ideas to write content around. The fact that it shows you the average monthly searches for each keyword makes this tool even more valuable. This ensures that the content you create is focused on topics relative to what people are searching on a daily basis.

Keep in mind that the numbers won’t be entirely accurate - they really are just one piece of the keyword research puzzle so use this tool accordingly.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

When starting a new SEO project we almost always perform an in-depth technical website audit. This task can be extremely daunting and take up an overwhelming amount of time. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is our go-to SEO tool when it comes to making site audits more efficient.

Screaming Frog can quickly crawl the entire website, checking for proper response codes, broken links, meta titles, content length, and even the presence of Google Analytics code on every page. For more information about the capabilities of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider check this out.

The best part about Screaming Frog is that all of this information can easily be downloaded onto an Excel spreadsheet, organized, and sent out within minutes. If your task involves crawling a website for whatever reason, this tool can probably get the job done for you.

3. SEM Rush

SEMrush has a variety of different tools packed into one. Not only is it a keyword research tool, but it can also be used for analyzing keyword competition, getting detailed ranking data for competing websites, and provide you with insight on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

One of the best features that SEMrush has to offer is its ability to easily conduct competitor research. Specifically, it can be used to discover keywords your competitors are ranking for organically and terms they’re bidding on for PPC. In addition, SEMrush has a section that allows you to compare your domain vs. your competition by keywords. Having this insight is highly valuable because it allows you to develop new strategies based on what your competition is doing.

There are thousands of SEO tools out there. Honestly, I could write a book about all the tools that I use on a daily basis and why. In this article, I wanted to focus on our top 3 and give you an overview of why they’re so valuable. So check them out - you'll be happy you did!

What are your favorites?