By Emilio Lara, Manager of the Technical Department

SEO is an extremely board field as anyone familiar with it knows. That’s why it’s necessary (and practically essential) to use as many tools as possible, because they make all of the difference if you want to save time and effort.

Therefore, in my article today, I am going to recommend all of the SEO tools that I use regularly. I hope that they’re as big a help to you as they are to me.

Keywords

Creating an optimal keyword plan is not a simple task. You have to bear in mind that the keywords that you choose are going to be the cornerstones of your SEO strategy. If you don’t choose the right ones, no matter how well you do everything else, it’ll do no good. My favour keyword research tools are:

Google AdWords (Keyword planner)

The ultimate keywords tool. Essential to find out the number of searches, the trends and the bids on the keywords that you are searching for.

Übersuggest

This online application provides a lot of suggestions about a keyword. Very good for discovering new words that you hadn’t considered.

Mergewords

Another very handy website for merging keywords. It allows you to enter several lists of words and then the application merges them, so that you get all of the possible combinations.

Google Trends

Another Google tool that allows you to find out about your keywords’ trends and seasonality.

Monitoring / SEO Reports

This section focuses on the tools that offer detailed reports on your SEO strategies (link building, rankings, keywords, competitors etc.).

MetricSpot

On this website you can analyse any website you like. You can look at your website to see what where you’ve gone wrong or investigate your competitors’ work.

WooRank

Highly similar to MetricSpot. When it analyses a website it give you general information about what aspects need to be improved and what you’ve got right.

GTmetrix

If you want the details of your website’s load time, this is the place for you.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google’s official website for examining the load time of a website, both on PCs and mobile devices.

CrazyEgg

This website allows you to monitor everything that users do on your website through a small trace file on your server. It’s very good for finding out about the users’ experience on your website. There is a charge for using this tool.

SessionCam

Similar to CrazyEgg. This application allows you to create heatmaps (to see where users who visit your website are clicking) and analyse their profiles. Although there is a free version, you also have to pay for this.

Competitors

In this section I will list the tools with which you can monitor your competitors. This is highly useful and essential for focusing your SEO strategy in the right direction, as it allows you to copy your rivals’ good choices and avoid their mistakes.

Google

I may sound very basic, but Google is the best tool for this. By using the keywords related to your theme, you can find your most direct competitors and visit their websites to analyse them.

SEOquake

This is a small add-on for Chrome. I’ve put it here because I find it very useful for finding out the meta tags and keyword density on any website. Very easy to install and very handy.

BuiltWith

BuiltWith shows us what tools have been used to build a website. Very useful for identifying your competitors’ strategies.

Social networks

Social networks are extremely important for SEO. Here are a few handy applications for managing them without killing yourself in the process.

Hootsuite

The best tool for controlling your Twitter accounts. You can also install a desktop application.

SocialBro

A good application for finding out information about any Twitter profile.

LikeAlyzer

A good analytics website, in this case for Facebook.

Complete SEO tools

Finally, below I’ve listed some tools that manage all of these aspects at once and combine all of the reports and details necessary to keep your SEO strategy up-to-date.

SEMrush

A very good tool, maybe one of the best for monitoring keywords, but it only has a free trial period. You’ll have to put your hand in your pocket if you want to use it regularly.

Ahrefs

Another great SEO application. In this case, Ahrefs specialises in link building, using a large link analysis system.

Sistrix

One of the most recent ones I’ve found. Sistrix is no slouch when it comes to monitoring SEO data. A fairly comprehensive tool.

As you can see, SEO is a whole world within itself, from tools that specialise in specific tasks to tools that cover all types of tasks and try to cover all possible areas.

These are only some of the tools that I use in my day-to-day work, but there are many more that could be included in our SEO manual.

So long and see you soon.