SEO Tools

As an SEO Specialist (or SEO expert), you will use a number of digital tools to help you carry out analysis, boost your efficiency, and improve the ranking and visibility of your website.

Some of these instruments are the platforms themselves—SEM systems like Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, or the social media channels where you’ll be posting your organic content. Others are analysis tools closely related to these platforms, such as Google Analytics or Google Trends.

To really optimize these very useful aids, you’ll want to begin with a clear understanding of how search actually works, and how it translates into search results—concepts like site crawlers and page indexing; meta descriptions, on-page optimization, and answer boxes; Google Search Console, rich snippets and data highlighter; and pay-per-click advertising, ad groups and remarketing.

With a grasp of the search landscape, you’re ready to move on to higher-order digital tools like Ahrefs, which is specifically designed to help you conduct research on SEO keywords. With a paid subscription to Ahrefs, you’ll be able to hone in on the search terms that will let you optimize your content for SEO, whether you’re creating a blog for your customers or adding enhanced descriptions to your product listings. In fact, almost three quarters of Marketers worldwide—72 percent—said relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic, emphasizing the importance of this step.

Conducting keyword research can be tedious, to say the least. Tools like Ahrefs greatly speed up the research process. While there are others—Linkio, Alexa, SEMRush, Serpstat, and Google Keyword Planner, to name just a few—Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive, combining a number of features to optimize content into a single platform. With Ahrefs, SEO Specialists can, for example, explore relevant keywords, check backlinks to their website’s pages, pull up related keywords based on searches, analyze competitors’ SEO, and even discover the most shared content online.

In fact, there are tools for almost every aspect of SEO management: Moz to audit your audience targeting, Cyfe to consolidate your social media channels’ metrics, SpyFu to monitor changes to your competitors’ traffic, Google PageSpeed Insights to check your page loading times, and so on. While SEO Specialists don’t rely on all these tools every day, this list speaks to the wide variety of different considerations they have to evaluate in their pursuit of SEO maximization.