Do you want to propel your website to the top of the search engine rankings in 2019? Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee you the top spot in the organic rankings for your most competitive keywords, but we can share with you what we think are the very best SEO tools to help you get there.
So, just what are some of the industry’s best tools and how can they help you in 2019? We have canvassed the opinions of a number of SEO experts to bring you this guide.
- SEMrush
This was one the tool that was mentioned by almost every industry insider we spoke to, so it must be pretty good. SEMrush is a marketing suite that picks apart your online presence from every possible angle. It looks at all the same factors as the search engine algorithms, including backlinks, content, social media and search engine result page (SERP) ranking.
According to the specialists at Regex SEO, the biggest selling point of the platform is its ability to peer into the SEO of your competitors to see what they’re doing well and where they’re scoring their wins. They said: “All you need to do is add the URL and it will reveal a list of competitors you didn’t even know you had that are targeting the same keywords as you. You can see what other keywords those competitors are ranking for to identify niches you might have missed.”
- Long Tail Pro
Ask SEO experts which part of their job they like the least and keyword research will usually be up there for most. Keyword research is the backbone of every successful SEO project, as it reveals the terms prospective online customers are using to find businesses just like yours. However, it does tend to be a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, particularly when you’re trying to dig out those long tail keywords that are far less competitive and easier to rank for.
Long Tail Pro simplifies that process enormously. All you have to do is enter a single seed keyword and it will generate up to 400 long tail keywords in seconds that meet your particular preferences. That’s a job which would take at least a couple of hours to perform manually.
- SEOability
You don’t get much in this world for free, but SEOability bucks that trend by offering a free plan that will allow you to crawl 1,000 pages of a single domain, analyze up to 10 keywords and provide a comparison of three competitors.
The paid-package comes in at $40 a month and offers a much wider range of functionality. That includes a comprehensive SEO analysis of backlinks across an unlimited number of projects and many more keywords. However, all that can come later. As a starting point, our industry experts think the free plan is an excellent way to get to grips with the SEO of your site.
- Majestic
Despite all the changes that the search engines have undergone over the years, backlinks are still one of the fundamentals of SEO. Having an authoritative range of backlinks from reputable sources can send your website soaring up the search engine rankings like little else. That’s exactly where Majestic can help.
Majestic a specialist tool that does one thing extremely well. It specializes in backlinks and uses one of the most extensive crawlers out there to provide unrivaled backlink analysis and insight that you will not get from an all-in-one tool like SEMrush. One of the key features we love is the ability to perform an in-depth analysis of your competitors’ backlinks. Majestic will identify every single link that points to that site so you can figure out where the best opportunities exist to create your own powerful links so you can improve your own backlinking strategy.
- Sitebulb
When it comes to the more technical side of SEO, Sitebulb is a tool that will streamline, ease and organize your workload. It provides critical insight into a diverse range of technical SEO issues such as anchor text, content readability, duplicate content issues, meta information, header information, and internal and external links. Basically, all the on-page fundamentals that must be in place for your content to perform well in the SERPs.
The real beauty of Sitebulb is in its seamless presentation of what can be complex information. The easily digestible format allows you to dig up specifics about how your site is being indexed and identify the technical issues you might have overlooked that are lurking behind the scenes.
- SEOquake
Many of the SEO experts we canvassed gave a special mention to this handy little tool. SEOquake is a free browser extension that gives you instant access to key SEO metrics about the webpage you are on. That means, at a glance, you can get insights into:
- The number of backlinks the page has
- Google rank
- The domain age
- SEMrush rank
- Alexa rank
- And more…
That allows you to perform detailed SEO audits in a flash. You can also request a comprehensive report on all the keywords found on the page and even export, save and print those reports for further analysis. And remember, all that functionality is completely free!
Are there any SEO tools you swear by that didn’t make it onto our list? Please share your favorites with our readers in the comments below.