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Having a set of efficient SEO tools at hand as a blogger and copywriter can help you get better results and higher rankings, not only for your website but also for those of your clients.

In my course “How to create SEO-friendly content” I cover and share some of the SEO tools I use, including how I use them in order to strategically add relevant keywords that I have researched. You can also watch how Fernando and I find the best keywords to embed in an article so it ranks quickly and effectively:

 

In this article, I want to help you identify an SEO tool that will work for you. Try a search for an online tool that can help you perform search engine optimization. You’ll find too many to count, literally. Don’t let the overload of choices weigh you down.

I’ve done the hard yards and can save you hundreds of hours of search, trial, and frustration.

The first step I took was to make a list of the functions that I need my SEO tools to perform. After that, I went on to choose the tools for my SEO toolbox as I already had a clear idea of what kinds of SEO tools and features I wanted.

Checking Your SEO Needs

Be it a professional website, a blog, or an e-commerce site, there are some basic functions that the tools in your SEO toolbox must be able to perform. These include:

  • Analyze the performance and functionality status of your website.
  • Ensure that content is optimized for better web visibility
  • Compare the site performance with competing sites.
  • Track visibility on social media and platforms to monitor the web traffic.
  • Check backlinks and plan link building.

My SEO Toolbox – What’s in it?

You don’t need complex and time-consuming software. Simple and small tools can easily perform SEO as well as their complex and often expensive counterparts.

Have a look at what I’ve included in my SEO toolbox. The listed SEO tools allow me to perform required optimization whenever I need to, without burning a hole in my pocket.

Because if you’re just starting out as content or copywriter for the web, you won’t be in a position to pay for expensive tools yet. But you still want to create content that is popular on search engines like Google.

So the below SEO tools may not be completely free, but some offer certain features for free or they are at the lower end of the scale and many offer free trials to test them as well.

SEO Site Checkup

You can choose from more than a dozen free tests on SEO Site Checkup to check your site’s current performance metrics. Use this to analyze your shortcomings.

A few of the free tests include:

  • Google Search Results Preview Test – To see how your page appears in Google Searches.
  • Most Common Keywords Test – To see keywords and topics that crawlers associate with your page.
  • Competitor Domain Test – To check what sites are your competitors and research terms they’re ranking for.
  • Social Media Test – To check whether your site connects to social media platforms.

After analyzing your site’s problem areas with these tests, think about how you can improve them. Make a strategic plan for certain pages or posts to achieve higher ranks.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a very handy tool that enables you to create better and more relevant content. By analyzing the popularity of a topic over the months, it provides crucial insight on whether your chosen topic is a relevant one or if it’s no longer interesting to your target audience.

Use this tool to avoid wasting your time covering topics that your potential readers don’t care about. Analyze seasonal fluctuations in topic popularities to make sure you provide the right content at the right time of the year, especially if your website/blog focuses on trends.

WooRank

This tool provides a comprehensive website analysis and SEO audit, as well as suggestions for improvement. You can use it to check your site’s performance, usability, mobile-friendliness, social media presence, and more. WooRank also offers a Chrome extension that lets you analyze any webpage with one click.

CanIRank

If you want an answer to the question: “Can I rank for this keyword?” then this tool helps you by analyzing your site’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the competition level and opportunities for each keyword. You can also get actionable recommendations on how to improve your ranking potential and target the right keywords for your niche with CanIRank.

Screaming Frog

As a desktop-based website crawler that scans your site for SEO issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, redirects, and more Screaming Frog is quite powerful. You can use it to audit your site’s SEO health, identify errors and warnings, and export reports for further analysis, which comes in handy when pages have been deindexed for example.

Answer The Public

This tool analyses and provides you with the most trending searches from a list of Google’s auto prompt suggestions. It is very useful as it provides you with the latest topics and queries from web users.

ATP allows you to explore an untapped mine of content ideas. You can use these topics for content creation on your website to increase website popularity and improve your site rankings. By identifying your target audience and their interests, you can narrow down titles for your posts containing relevant and popular search terms. The free version allows up to two searches a day. It is part of Neil Patel’s UberSuggest, which is also listed here and you can probably combine both for different purposes.

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is a complete package tool that analyses your competitor’s SEO strategies for content and digital marketing so that you can utilize them for your website.

Created by the ultimate SEO guru, Neil Patel, this tool’s many features include domain overview of competitors, top SEO pages reports, and backlink data analysis. Use the knowledge to know what is trending in your target market and to improve upon your competition’s strategies and get better search visibility. Not all features are free to test it and if you really like it, you can choose a plan.

BuzzSumo

One of the highest-rated SEO tools on the market, BuzzSumo allows you to analyze content popularity and keyword performance on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.

You can track comments and trends to produce relevant content. It also allows identification of trending social media influencers so that you can advertise and popularise content by partnering with them. Many use commenting on blog posts or social media posts as ways to gain exposure for their web presence. Amongst bloggers, it is also common practice to exchange articles or publish guest articles to gain more traffic and grow the backlinking profile.

Google Analytics

I mainly use this tool to analyse Google data and as a website owner, you will have free access to Google Analytics once your website is submitted and indexed. I also use it via the seekahost.app to check all my blogs hosted there and their analytics.

It’s a very comprehensive SEO tool that lets you find out many insights into your website performance such as daily, weekly and monthly traffic, top-performing pages and posts, where your traffic comes from, how it varies and fluctuates, and much more.

It’s not necessarily ideal for keyword research, but it can provide great insights into how your written content performs. By comparing different time periods, you can see how the traffic changes when you optimize a page or post or how your visitor is led to other pages and posts through your internal links in the content. I find its use very easy and straight-forward compared to other SEO tools and the data is very accurate and detailed. However, it only covers Google searches, not other search engines like Bing.

AIO SEO

This tool is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your site for search engines, so it can only be used by WordPress webmasters via the backend. I use it for all my blog posts and so do all of the SeekaHost and ClickDo teams hence why we have created a tutorial and a whole AIO SEO course:

Some of the features of AIO SEO include:
– Smart XML sitemaps that automatically update and submit to Google and other search engines.
– Social media integration that lets you control how your content looks when shared on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
– SEO monitoring and optimisation for your content and meta data.
– WooCommerce SEO that optimizes your online store and products for better conversions and sales.

Start Building Your SEO Toolbox

Now that you’ve seen what my toolbox looks like, why don’t you get on with putting together your toolbox with the SEO tools that suit your needs best?

Remember, first prioritize the functionalities you need and the budget you have available. Then, test the SEO tools I have introduced here to find out which works best for your requirements. You can obviously research more tools, and I have compared a few link analysis tools as well, to make your SEO content writing journey as successful as possible. And if you’re trying to land your first content writing jobs, check out my previous article about copywriter job platforms.

Feel free to contact me with regards to my SEO copywriting course or any other questions you may have about this topic via manuela@clickdo.co.uk or the contact form here.

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