Having trouble getting the attention of search engines? SEO can be complicated, especially if you don’t have the right tools to research keywords, target audiences, and competition. If you’re an agency looking to improve search rankings, here are some of the SEO tools we recommend to help you get to the top.
4 Agency-Friendly SEO Tools to Improve Rankings
Many freebies out there offer basic analysis, but what are the top SEO tools that are a must for every agency? Here are four we recommend.
1. Google Analytics
What is it?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. The analytics SEO tool helps you get a deeper understanding of your site visitors and customers, so you can deliver better experiences and drive results.
Why agencies should use it?
Insights on traffic data are one of the foundations of SEO management. Analytics makes it easy to understand how a site’s users are engaging with content, so you know what’s working and what isn’t, thus helping you make data-backed decisions. See which channels and pages perform best with a variety of reports that cover audience, behavior, conversion, and more.
Cost
Start for free, which is ideal for individuals and small to medium-sized companies, or talk to sales about the Analytics 360 platform (supposedly $150,000/year), ideal for enterprises that need integrations, advanced reporting and modeling, and other exclusive features.
2. SEMrush
What is it?
SEMrush is a suite of SEO tools that give you insights into the strategies of your competitor’s organic and paid search, display advertising, and link building. Position tracking, in particular, allows you to track your website’s rankings for target keywords in the Google top 100 organic and paid results. You can also track the rankings of competitors for a side-by-side comparison to help you identify topic areas that need attention.
Why agencies should use it?
Insights to ranking data are another foundation of SEO management. As an agency, you should always know where your client’s website stands in search results. Regularly-updated data will help show how your optimization efforts have had any impact on keyword rankings over time.
Cost
The entire suite, including Position Tracking: $100/month for freelancers and startups with limited budget, $200/month for small businesses and growing marketing agencies, and $400/month for agencies and businesses with an extensive web presence. The higher the tier, the more reporting, and capabilities you’ll have.
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
What is it?
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that allows you to crawl a website’s URLs, fetching key elements to analyze and audit technical and onsite SEO. The crawling tool is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and large websites efficiently with real-time results, gathering key onsite data to help you make informed decisions.
Why agencies should use it?
Any agency that conducts SEO audits should have a website crawling tool, as the ability to diagnose a site’s structure and status codes at scale is imperative. Quickly identify issues and opportunities across thousands of URLs without the hassle of manually checking pages on site one at a time. Analyze page titles and metadata, review metadata and directives, discover duplicate pages, generate XML sitemaps, and more.
Cost
Download the free version (500 URL crawl limit and limited features) or purchase an annual £149 license (about $191 as of January 2019) for unlimited crawling and all the SEO tool’s advanced features.
4. Google Search Console
What is it?
Google Search Console is a web service by Google for webmasters that allows webmasters (and those who manage site performance, like agencies) to check indexing status and optimize the visibility of their websites. This SEO tool used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools, which was rebranded to Google Search Console in 2015. It’s also a good idea to set up Bing Webmaster Tools.
Why agencies should use it?
Since Google will likely account for the majority of your site’s search traffic, it’s important to know how Google sees and indexes your pages. See which queries bring users to your site. Analyze your site’s impressions, clicks, and position in search results. Receive alerts when an issue is identified with the indexing of your site. You can even manually submit sitemaps and individual URLs for Google to crawl.
Cost
Free.
Try One Out Today!
Not sure where to start? Take time today to choose one of our recommendations. Try and get familiar with it and determine if it offers the features you need. If you’re not sure, try another. List the pros and cons. You may find you may want to use more than one of them to achieve your SEO goals.
And if you still have questions, drop us a line in the comments below. We’ll be happy to help.
