Best SEO Tools of 2016

With Google and Bing constantly changing the rules and algorithms for getting found online, never has it been more important to utilize SEO. The best SEO tools will save you a lot of time, and provide you with insight to help you quickly explore challenges and opportunities within your website. Without these your Google ranking may suffer, and you may not understand how to increase user satisfaction. You will likely need some degree of experience to get the very most out of them, but here are some of our favorite new [and old] tools out there:

1. Crawler – this tool crawls the web looking for content to index and present to its users. SEO Crawler tools mimic ‘Googlebot’ (in a similar, yet limited way) and lists elements that can be ‘optimized’ to make your pages easier to crawl and index properly.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider – is a crawl tool for analyzing the structure of a website, and can audit your website from a technical point of view, and with it promptly collect the necessary information needed to optimize your site.
3. Deep Crawl – an ideal solution when crawling larger sites, or if you need your crawler in the cloud. This tool can be quite useful for large site migrations, and it can easily check if tags are set up correctly. Basically, it’s similar to Screaming Frog (above), but has the benefit of remote crawling, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself.
4. Integrity for Mac – a free tool for Apple computers only, and can also find broken links on your site. Integrity can find those and alert you, to prevent Pagerank drops and bad user experiences.
5. Website Auditor – a tool for spidering, checking and evaluating the links and pages on your website. It’s ideal for SEO and web developers alike, often to see how many pages have the least/most links, which pages have external links and finding broken links. It can do a lot more, though.
6. URL Profiler – a multi-task tool that can be easily configured to grab data on any URL. This handy tool is ideal for checking if your URLs are indexed in Google, or if you want to quickly grab social and backlink data for any URL.
7. SEMrush – a keyword research tool for professional keyword snoopers. It identifies which keywords might be popular in your niche, and provides related keywords you may want to disperse throughout your content. In addition, it also provides the worth of the keyword in Google Adwords, and how competitive the keyword may be.
8. Long Tail Pro – another keyword research tool that includes some clever competitor analysis to help you target the right keywords on your site.This tool can quickly analyze the top 10 results in Google for each of your keywords, saving you a ton of time.
9. Searchmetrics Suite – designed to help marketers plan, execute, measure and report on internet marketing strategies and review site performance over the previous six months. It’s useful for competitor keyword analysis and to get a quick overview of any site that already has some visibility in Google.
10. Majestic SEO – an extremely popular tool most often used to review competitor backlink analysis to gather historic and real-time data and identify what competitors are using and what’s working (or not.)

As you can see, there are several tools available for maximizing SEO and increasing page rank within Google.

We have a bonus tool for you too. It’s our Online Visibility Report that is free to run at any time on your business, your clients’ businesses or even competitors. Find out where brick-and-mortar businesses rank locally on search engines and the top directory sites. This local SEO tool is a must for every business.

The secret to success with using all tools is how you interpret the data and ultimately, apply it.

Do you have a favorite tool? Comment below and let us hear about it.