Having been doing SEO for many years, even with results of a certain level, I am often contacted by friends, novice colleagues, but also by simply curious, who want to receive information or advice on what are the best tools for those who do this job.
In order to avoid repeating the same things over and over, I decided to enclose this information in a single post, which lists and reviews the SEO tools that I use the most, the most reliable ones, which make my life easier by performing long and repetitive operations in automated way.
To better understand when and how to use these tools, I will divide them according to the various phases of the work that every good SEO Specialist should do:
SEMRUSH - THE MOST POWERFUL AND COMPLETE SEO SUITE
This SEO tool is one of my favorites and it is no coincidence that Semrush is a global leader in SEO suites. To check the ranking of a site, just enter a simple url and press the SEARCH button to get a very detailed SEO analysis, which provides in order:
- temporal trend of the ranking with relative drops and improvements
- number of organic keywords with which the site is indexed
- organic traffic
- authority score (it is the numerical value that determines the authority of the domain / url according to the Semrush algorithm)
- ranking and related traffic for the various countries in which it is positioned
- changes of positions
- ranking distribution with respect to the position in Google's serp
- list of organic competitors with relative ranking in comparison
- traffic breakdown by generic keywords compared to branded keywords
- list of backlinks with their anchors
- backlink domains with relative IP
- number and list of indexed pages
- SERP functionality related to the domain, which clearly can have different rankings on the universal search side (images, videos, local packs,
- list of paid Google Ads keywords with related search and display ads
- Then there is the whole hyper-in-depth section relating to the health of the site, which Semrush analyzes by defining all the problems and related areas for technical improvement.
Link to the site that offers the possibility of a free 7-day trial: www.semrush.com
COPYSCAPE
Check for duplicate content
One of the main enemies for those who do SEO are duplicate content, or texts copied from other pages on the web, and therefore rightly penalized by Google.
In this regard, it often happens that many of my clients, whether aware or not, find the website full of these texts, perhaps copied at the time by themselves or by the web copywriter in charge. To verify this, I always use Copyscape, a simple and effective site that scans the web at supersonic speed in search of duplicate texts.
The operation is very simple, enter a web address and press search, if there are other websites with the same portion of text, they will be listed with the respective url. The free version provides a maximum of 10 results, while the Premium version, which is paid, returns a complete analysis.
Link to the site: www.copyscape.com
Pingdom Tools eWebPageTest
Measure site speed and performance
Pingdom Tools and WebPageTest are two sites that allow you to carry out an analysis on the speed and performance of a website, increasingly crucial SEO factors, especially with the advent of the new Google Caffeine algorithm, which rewards the lightest and fastest sites .
Both also provide related recommendations for improving performance in every respect.
Links to their respective sites: http://tools.pingdom.com - www.webpagetest.org
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Last but not least, I also point out the Google webmaster tool, a free tool that combined with SemRush, guarantees me full control over all the websites I deal with.
This tool allows us to really know how Google sees our site, what ranking and organic traffic it gets, providing very useful reports that can be selected with respect to a certain time interval.
Furthermore, Google lists all the indexed pages and the related technical problems that afflict them, highlighting aspects of performance and specific optimization in a mobile key.
I hope this list helps, but if you think there are other utilities, tools and plugins that deserve to be mentioned, please report them by posting a comment on the blog!
