Organic search refers to how your visitors get to your site based on their queries on search engines (most frequently Google – >90% of searches). Whatever your product or service is, reaching the top of the search results has become a top priority for most businesses marketing departments. Google constantly revises and edits its search algorithms, which keep marketing departments on their toes. As you can imagine, this brings out some extreme challenges to teams when these changes happen, and they must adapt their strategy. This is where the right tool can significantly assist you and your team.
With a firm emphasis on the tools, a great tool can make a big impact on how you handle these changes and how you create your marketing strategy. If you wish to buy an advertisement and appear at the top of the search (search engine marketing or SEM), Google will gladly take your money. If you wish to appear towards the top of the search results to achieve the more customer-trusted organic searches, you must have a balanced SEO strategy.
When it comes to choosing the correct SEO tool that best suits the needs of your business, it all comes down to setting realistic goals. It also comes down to which tool provides equal parts of the different SEO aspects and which features mean most to you and your company. If the tool is telling you that changes are needed on your website, does it then provide you with the ability to change them? Below we have put together a list of the 5 best SEO tools to help your marketing team’s efforts.
SEMrush
SEMrush delivers what most typical small to medium-sized business marketing teams need. This tool provides a wide array of functionality and features, including keyword research, search position monitoring, and crawling. Starting at just $99.95/month for its pro plan, you get quite a bit of value for this price. You are allowed 3,000 reports or searches each day, allot for five projects, 500 keywords to track, and 100,000 crawled page limit. SEMrush thrives at this price point with it’s intended small to medium-sized businesses as most companies can afford this price point for these features.
Ahrefs
This full-featured tool is aimed directly at individuals who know what they are doing when it comes to SEO but want some features to assist them better. Ahrefs maintains one of the most extensive indexes of backlinks on the web, currently in excess of 12 trillion backlinks, and more than 6 billion web pages crawled per day. They are allowing your marketing team to do what they do best with a tool that will enable them to reach their SEO goals. Ahrefs also includes several other features to assist with your keyword research, ongoing SEO search position monitoring, competitive analysis, and more. Overall, this tool allows you to do a little bit of everything but excels in its crawling abilities.
Moz Pro
Moz Pro could be described as one of the pioneers in the SEO space. The team has very clearly worked exceptionally hard to develop the best all-round package for an end-to-end SEO solution from crawling to keyword management. Their metrics are so in-depth that they have become something of an industry-standard. With a slick and easy to use interface, Moz Pro seems to almost be too good to be true at a price of only $79 per month billed annually. There are more robust features you can add to raising the price, but with a low barrier to entry, it is difficult to not use this tool.
Majestic
SEO tools generally fall into one or more of three categories: ongoing position monitoring, keyword research, and crawling. Majestic falls into the third category. This very specialized tool focuses on backlink tracking. As backlinks are very important to your SEO position, this is a very powerful tool for marketers. With over 1.3 trillion unique URLs crawled, it has a vast index to date to pull from. The tools have been systematically built to help sort, analyze, and transform the data into usable SEO metrics to help marketers use this data. Starting at $49.99 per month (billed quarterly or every three months), it is a very cost-effective tool to add to your marketer’s tool chest, and the information provided is immediately actionable.
SpyFu
While some of these tools’ SEO package can be difficult to use for novices, it provides an excellent overall experience. SpyFu allows for a range of features giving the advanced SEO practitioners and novice users the tools they need to grow their SEO presence and rank higher organically with the insights it provides. With a streamlined and clean UI, it allows users to easily navigate through the tool and find the features they need with minimal support or training. For small to medium-sized businesses, this is the perfect tool as it has been designed with these users in mind and offers the most amount of value for them. Starting at $33 per month when billed annually, it fulfills not only the marketer’s requirements for features but also the company requirements for a cost-effective solution.
When it comes down to which tool you are planning to use, you need to pick the platform that will do what you are setting out to improve. If there is a tool that focuses on one section of SEO over others, you will want to ensure that is the section you wish to focus on. Most companies know going into looking for a tool, what aspect of their SEO they wish to improve or need help managing. If you do not yet know which aspect of SEO this is for you, you should first go over your current SEO practices and see where you sit. Then you and your marketing team can discuss which aspect of your SEO needs the most help/managing, and you can find a tool that best fits your needs instead of finding a tool and trying to make it fit your needs. Forcing a tool to work for you will not only cause you a headache, but it can create a negative relationship between you and the support team at the same time. There is a wealth of data out there to give your business a competitive advantage, make sure you choose the right tool to get the most out of your investment.