When it comes to SEO Tools, everybody has different tools in their toolbox. Some tools are more used than others. We wanted to create this roundup of what SEO professionals thought were the most underrated tools.
Some tools you may recognise but may not have realised the full potential of them, others you may not have heard of before.
Here is what 7 experts had to say:
Megan Meade – Marketing Specialist – Software Path
Tool(s): LSI Graph
Reasons: LSI keywords are a little late to the SEO party, meaning not many people intentionally utilize them in their work; LSI stands for latent semantic indexing keywords aka words that are semantically related to your main keywords. By using LSI Graph, you can input your targeted keywords and receive back contextually relevant keywords that have a high degree of correlation to the primary keyword. Not only this, but the tool also provides a relevancy and volume score so it’s easier to sort which LSI keywords will be most useful in your text. LSI keywords point to the relevancy of your content (a key ranking factor for SEO) and allow you to input relevant, natural keywords into your content more frequently.
Buzz Carter – Head of Outreach – Bulldog Digital Media
Reasons: Twitter – It’s not really a tool is it? But for outreach & building links, Twitter has some great utility to it, that I still see a lot of SEOs ignore.
Using HashTags like #JournoRequests, you can find a big list of Journalists & Bloggers looking for expert comments, opinions and quotes for a variety of subjects.
For anyone trying to get some awesome links this is the place to be, taking the occasional scroll once or twice a day can help you find some awesome placements, where you can get a link on a high authority site, for about 10 minutes of work in getting a quote from your client.
HARO – Again, it’s not really a tool, more of a service.
HARO operates on the same premise as #JournoRequests, but rather than scrolling through Twitter you get a bunch sent to you in the Morning, Afternoon & Evening.
Better yet, they segment the requests by niche, so if you just want links for a health client, just skip to the ‘Biotech and Healthcare’ section, this really cuts down the time of sifting through irrelevant request.
I’ve got some really high-value links by responding to journalist’s requests through the HARO emails, so it’s always good to be signed up & check it over from time to time.
Jack Minot – SEO Manager – Honchō
Tool(s): Schema Markup Generator & Python – Specifically using Python with PyCharm
Reasons: Schema Markup Generator is a great way to create quick, easy and error-free Schema mark-up in JSON format. Very handy when you want to create an example for a client or a snippet for your own website. A great thing is that it’s accessible and useable by everyone, junior members of the team or non-technical people can jump straight in, without having to learn syntaxes. It’s also free!
Introducing Python into our processes has been super valuable. Saving time when tackling everyday SEO jobs. My favourite use cases are… 1) Creating keyword permutations, utilising LISTS and FOR loops. This means you can get your top-level keyword research and create all combination variants, really useful when hunting for search volume and identifying search trends. 2) Using APIs like SEMrush, aHrefs or Grepwords to get keyword and domain metrics. Rather than having to log into a website, tackle the interface, upload a file, download the results. It can all be made seem-less straight from your Python IDE, written straight into an XLS or CSV file.
Jake Jackson – Technical SEO Executive – Return on Digital
Tool(s): Google Data Studio & Ahrefs
Reasons: GDS
– Track KPIs easily
– Track Impressions/Position/Clicks
– Monthly Dashboard Updates
– Easy for none SEO to digest
AHREFS
– Lost & Gained Links
– Keyword Gap Analysis
– Site Audit Scheduler
– Rank Tracker with Tags
Matt Stott – Marketing Director – Brickwork Agency
Reasons: Reddit is awesome for finding keywords that real people use, I find so many good terms that I hadn’t thought of & that are much less competitive. I also love Smush in WordPress as it’s so easy to use, and typically the images we upload are around 70% smaller in size. A lot of small to medium-size firms really ignore the impact on speed; which large images can have.
Ric Rodriguez – Digital Consultant
Tool(s): CognitiveSEO & SEO Monitor
Reasons: I’ve been using CognitiveSEO for nearly five years; Razvan and the team have created something really special – a backlink analysis tool that allows you to visualise your profile easily – but also lets you drill down and make your own decisions on the data.
SEO Monitor is a tool I’ve used more recently, but as a rank tracker it very much does what it says on the tin and their quick data pulling and ‘scale as you use’ pricing model makes them a real contender in the space.
Dan Buzan – Co-Founder – Contega Media
Tool(s): Buzzstream and ServiceProviderPRO CRM
Reasons: Buzzstream
Everybody is so obsessed with another outreach technique, open and reply rates, but just imagine that you have been doing this for years and for that moment you gathered over 5k of placement opportunities. Where will you manage it, how will you reuse it or simply quickly find anything when there will be a need? Buzzstream is a real link building Vault, your ultimate storage keeper with auto DA update and all of your outreach sequences in one place. Saved me tons of time and mental health. No more spreadsheets mess or 10 mailboxes management. One disadvantage is that I wouldn’t recommend it for personal usage due to the high monthly cost, but it’s definitely worth it if you’re doing link building for clients.
Service Provider PRO (SPP)
That one is a CRM for managing link building and SEO service orders. The main problem with all CRM’s is that they are like a sausage machine, too general, too much stuff that you’ll never use. You’re always trying to adjust its function to your processes and it requires extra plugins, extensions, custom development, everything to get you as much annoyed as possible. SPP was for me like a gasp of fresh air – it was made for managing SEO packages, so it comes with client area, therefore your clients can track the progress, communicate with your team, manage invoices, claims referral codes and more. For example, one more thing that makes me happy about SPP is their support when I’ve asked whether there is a pre-payment feature when invoicing, they responded to me like “advance payments only” and I just tweaked the whole process to full payment and never regret about it. Every aspect in SPP is based on experience from other link builders in the niche. You probably won’t find it elsewhere except branded link in the competitor client area. That definitely speaks for itself.
Matthew Hunt – SEO Consultant
Tool(s): Screaming Frog
I love the simplicity of Screaming Frog and the way a basic crawl can identify a wide range of technical SEO issues. List mode, XML sitemaps, hreflang, it can do so much.
The price is great to!