We love optimization in everything we do. From the campaigns we run for our clients through our own personal productivity, we’re always trying to find ways to improve how we do what we do.
Tools are a powerful way to do this, whether it’s automating your processes or collecting the specific insights that you need the most. The most talented SEO with the best strategy still needs to be armed with the right tools in order to achieve maximum success. Ultimately, we recommend using multiple tactics side-by-side in order to maximize your strategy’s value. We’ve tried to embed tips and tricks to optimize your workflow as part of this offering of tools.
This list is intended to be comprehensive, but we know it’s a work in progress. If you have a tool to recommend that’s not already listed or any proposed revisions to this list, please email nicole [at} northstarinbound {dot] org.
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All tools on our list have been classified according to our tags, their platform, and their cost. To make it easier, here’s a key to all of our tags and platforms:
- – Keyword Research – Helps you understand which keywords to associate with your site/content.
- – Backlink Analysis – Gives you insight into your and/or your competitors’ link profiles.
- – Technical SEO – Quicksprout defines technical SEO as “focused on how well search engine spiders can crawl your site and index your content.”
- – Content – For developing and managing content projects.
- – Prospecting – Helps you identify to which sites you should reach out, and often how.
- – Outreach – Helps you manage your campaigns to the leads you found.
- – Social Media – Sheds light on some aspect of social media: FB, Twitter, et al.
- – Local – These products have features to help you specifically target local efforts.
- – Enterprise (Suite) – Though anyone can technically buy them, these products usually target enterprise companies.
Additionally, you can filter the tools based on their ‘platforms’:
- – Web-based – The now-traditional SaaS that you access via web browser.
- – API – You have access to the API, so you can integrate it into your other platforms!
- – Gmail Add-On – Add this to your Gmail account and prosper.
- – Browser Extension – Load this into your browser for as-you-work integration.
- – WP Plug-in – You guessed it: WordPress, baby.
- – App – Download this to your machine.
Use the checkboxes below to narrow down our list of tools to exactly what you’re looking for.
Need to find bloggers and other key influencers in a particular niche? Pitchbox uses everything from Moz, Majestic, SEMRush, and LRT to define authority. Want to write and schedule your own email campaigns and then monitor performance? This is your tool.
seoClarity helps you make sense of your customers' and target audiences' behavior, so that you align your site optimization accordingly - everything from SEO through killer content. The flexibility of the dashboard helps ensure that your reporting is in line with your specific goals.
Detailed reporting allows you to monitor your rankings on organic, local, and mobile.
A fantastic SEO project management tool that covers every aspect of SEO, from a long-time industry player, with price points to accommodate you no matter where you are on your company journey (big or small).
Since 2008, SISTRIX has been collecting data that you can tap into using their tools, using this history to guide your future strategies. Their friendly dashboard covers everything from SEO and link building through social.
Flexibility and customization is king with SEObook. Download or access online only the specific components you need, to build out or supplement your existing workflow.
One of the most popular SEO tools for both agencies and enterprise, this is a powerful site crawler that hits every parameter you need to tackle for SEO.
This tool ties your SEO rankings across 239 search engines to traffic (and compare with up to 10 competitors). Generate automatic reports easily to keep this data at your fingertips without having to constantly log on.
Very well respected tool with lots of SEO power. Handy visualizations helps you grasp search volume on ranking keywords and compare them to competitors. SM crawls your site - through subdomains - and tells you where you rank on keywords, down to position and search volume, and informs you of your competitors' stats as well.
Rio tries to marry enterprise companies with strong local presence, from managing local listings, pages, and social media signals through local reporting, with the ultimate goal of boosting sales.
Based on Majestic, Moz, and Google Analytics, Raven helps you monitor your backlink profile - and those of your competitors - as well as everything you could possibly need to know about keywords to help optimize your SEO. It's easy to monitor your link building progress, which otherwise could get hairy as built links don't always show up if you only check one source.
Everything in this platform is centered around rankings - how can you optimize your presence in organic search so that, for relevant keywords, you always come out on top and thus get maximum traffic?
Plug in SEO monitors your site for search engine performance issues, and can be set up to send you daily reports - helping hold you accountable while also automating your process to save you time. Additionally, if you need help making fixes to your site, they offer fixed-price solutioning.
Great for enterprise companies with a strong global presence, since Pi Datametrics takes SEO tools to the international level. Pi builds a retrospective database of keyword searches across all engines (even mobile and YouTube) to allow you to accurately monitor trends and impacts.
With their Bing offering, Microsoft needed to release its own set of SEO tools, which work across all three major search platforms: Bing, Google, and Yahoo.
Let's get back to basics, shall we?
This tool's deep reporting skills help you crawl your site to preserve its search integrity and speed, and export all data in various formats to meet your workflow's needs.
This platforms helps you analyze your existing content as well as your competitors' in order to develop a data-based strategy for optimization; this can be tracked in real-time on an ongoing basis, to keep you abreast of new developments and even potential 'threats.' Designed for teams, you can set up custom reports to be delivered to each tember, and streamline communications on strategy and next-steps. One of the most widely celebrated features of this platform is the ability to easily transition from bird's eye view to boots-on-the-ground.
BrightLocal delivers a dashboard that covers all of your local SEO reporting needs in terms or organic, maps, and mobile seach, and it also allows you to set up alerts so you can be the first to know of any brand mentions and other relevant activity. This tool can plug in with Google Analytics, FB, and Twitter, to give you direct access to all of your critical data from one spot.
BrightEdge promises to help you elevate your SEO and content marketing in order to generate more traffic, tying every aspect of your web presence with ROI - specifically traffic, revenue, and engagement - and across all channels: search, social, and mobile.
Centered around SEO and content marketing for enterprise, Authoritas focuses on providing you with the data you need in order to make smart SEO business decisions. This platform shows detailed market analyses, real-time performance of keywords and competitors, and touts its big data skills.
As the name states, this was designed first and foremost for agencies. One of the most common pieces of praise for Agency Analytics is that new features are constantly being added to optimize the platform, which is an all-in-one SEO stop: with web analytics, PPC, and social media reporting capacities. White labeling lets you customize the dashboard and host it on your own domain, with the option to even give your clients a mobile app with their own branding.
This is a good, free bird’s eye audit of your site, with: PA, DA, Page Speed, sitemap, robots.txt, top 10 keywords, and social signals compiled quickly into an easy-to-download PDF.
Managing personas and their associated inboxes across different outreach campaigns gets tricky very quickly, as does managing the teams behind them. YourOutreach helps you automate the process, from contact-finding through follow-ups.
The #1 WordPress plugin, this helps you optimize your site’s keywords, content, linking, and more.
Tout helps you quickly grab contact information from pages and insert them into prewritten email templates, so that you can expedite your workflow and broaden the reach of all of your campaigns.
Though used primarily for sales, ZenProspect is used to generate prospect lists and build outreach campaigns through automatic email sequences and predictive analytics so that you can place your efforts where they will generate the greatest impact. Also worth noting is their reputation for customer support and product improvement, responding to feature requests and always optimizing.
Use this extension to further optimize your keyword brainstorming, using Wordtracker’s search database combined with your own performance metrics.
Perform detailed audits on your site and understand your keyword performance, both standalone as well as compared to your competitors.
Wincher's Rank Tracker focuses on rank tracking of both your URL of interest as well as its competitor(s), but specifically makes it easy for you and your team to readily access this data. Set your desired frequency for your rank alerts - as often as daily! - and easily export and/or share the resulting reports.
This is effectively SEO-oriented word processing, as Webtexttool will provide you with real-time optimization tips for your writing.
"FaqFox is essentially an on-demand survey with instantaneous results. You can’t do much better when it comes to preliminary market research."
Providing you with the standard keyword research and SEO analysis tools, WebCEO also lets you optimize your internal links and sitemap generation.
Use Tomoson to send free products to trusted bloggers to try and write reviews, expanding your marketing reach. Using an existing platform and process for this helps ensure you get responses.
Track your brand, campaign, hashtag or event performance across all countries over the last 7 days. Set up reports to be delivered to your inbox at set intervals.
SpyFu aims to provide you with your competitors’ secrets by identifying their most profitable keywords and ads.
Sprinklr is an enterprise-level social media management tool that spans a wide range of channels including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Helping to build, maintain, and track success across email, CRM, sites, and the individual channels, this is a powerful tool that works on the largest scale. We haven’t used this platform but we’ve heard it mentioned among enough of our clients to know it deserves a place on this list.
Set the frequency for your desired crawls, and then use this SEO audit tool to generate reports that will guide your optimization. You can generate email alerts as needed across multiple sites.
Analyze your on-page SEO, pages, ranks, backlinks, and keywords, as well as compare them with your competitors'.
As claimed on SERPWoo's page, "You can now monitor your domains within the top 100 results of the SERPs, regardless of whether it's regular, mobile, language specific, or locality specific (country/region/state/city level available)."
With instant SEO audits and backlink profiles, try this browser extension in case it fits with your workflow. Additionally, you can export all data so you can collect and analyze data in real time.
This SEO reporting suite empowers you with aggressive keyword research & management and suggestions, based on existing numbers as well as traffic predictions. Additionally, you can compare your site with those of your competitors.
The goal here is site optimization. This tool crawls all of your pages and identifies both errors as well as areas for improvement. Enable the monitoring service to have your site continuously monitored, and receive alerts as any issues arise.
Intended to help craft the perfect advertising strategy, this platform empowers you to understand keywords, backlinks, advertising (including video and product listings), and even social media, with functionality that allows you to visualize and compare your campaigns alongside those of your competitors.
"The Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser allows you to upload your log files, verify search engine bots, identify crawled URLs and analyse search bot data and behaviour for invaluable SEO insight."
If you're as concerned with productivity and efficiency as we are, you'll love this tool. Feed Rmoov domains and it will automatically extract contact info and even preload email templates with the information. You can even schedule automatic reminders!
RivalIQ offers competitive analysis not just for SEO keywords, but for site content and social media signals as well! You can set alerts, notifications, and reporting in order to streamline your processes and also ensure that you check in consistently.
Anchor text diversity is critical, particularly given the recent Penguin release. Use this tool to examine the health of your anchor text, focusing on root domains, total links, and mozRank.
QuickSprout connects to your Google Analytics account and focuses on monitoring your site traffic and alerting you to any changes that take place, so you can optimize accordingly.
This tool uses 6 different major search engines to help you find low-competition long tail keywords as well as products & services in untapped niches.
Rapidly scan your page for SEO performance issues.
Use Market Muse to analyze your domain versus the sites, news, blog posts, and social media pieces available on your topic of interest, and then have topical coverage gaps suggested to you that your content can address. This is a great way to bake into your campaigns some attention towards target audiences.
Quickly check if a linker URL is worth keeping.
Input a URL for basic SEO analytics to be conducted on any site, with basic backlink profiling, site health, and even keyword suggestions.
Automatic backlink tracking for both you and your competitors. Track any lost links as well as social media mentions, shares, and likes.
Manage your content marketing team using this productivity tool, which combines project management across the different roles with analysis and optimization features.
Look up a competitor URL, and spy on their keywords, ads, and their top competitors.
HitTail analyzes your site’s traffic and uses that to generate lists of long tail keywords that would fit your audience.
Find authority resources to interview and quote for your pieces, so you can produce better content.
Hunting down guest post opportunities can be time-consuming and expensive. Use GPT to find relevant authority blogs that are receptive to guest posts; these are categorized on DA and social signals, so that you can make solid, informed decisions that will have the greatest positive impact for your site/brand. They’re constantly working on growing out their list, so there’s always a way for you to keep growing.
Where could you find better analysis of your site's performance - from site traffic though indexing - other than straight from the horse's mouth?
A very cool tool offered by Google to help you dig deeper into search patterns and real-world trends. You can monitor search trends over specific time series, and/or look at specific US states.
Create alerts to be emailed to you as relates to your brand, your competitors, and your niche.
Track your performance via local rankings and help identify new local citation sources.
One way to stay on top of your inbox and your outreach is to use this platform to set reminders for yourself.
This tool scans your entire website through and through to audit according to Google guidelines, in the meantime putting your site data together into an easy-to-navigate table that makes analytics easier to perform.
Use EasyRedir when you need to manage your URL redirects, whether for website migration or general URL changes.
DeepCrawl helps you understand the architecture of your live site - as well as any planned changes - so that you can optimize your build for maximum search performance.
ClearVoice can help you get your content marketing campaigns in order, with a clean, logical interface and all the tools that make the most sense. Need to build out an editorial calendar or store your content ideas? Need analytics on how your content is performing? Need help discovering influencers? You can do all this and more - hiring talent and managing execution.
"CanIRank’s advanced machine learning analyzes your website and competitors<br />
to find keywords you can rank for, links you can get, & on-page optimizations that will move the needle."
Boasting its status as the world’s #1 Search Marketing Analytics platform, Botify is an incredible enterprise tool to optimize mobile and desktop organic traffic by providing data insights into traffic, keywords, links, and technical SEO.
Clean up your Analytics and statistics using Ad Words Robot, so you can remove referrer/ghost spam planted by robots.
Very comprehensive rank tracking that spans all levels of local: zip code, city, state. Track reports daily and get results stored in the cloud, so you remain light on your feet - your IP unblocked. Monitor historic data so you can track changes and success over time.
Adds a checkbox to all WP link entry windows so that you and your users can painlessly add the nofollow attiribute to any outgoing links.
"This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog."
Sometimes you need to strip the formatting for text as you transition from one tool to another.
Local search results - particularly based on city and zip - are becoming increasingly critical for successful link building. Use the Local Citation Finder to detect link opportunities, and the Local Rank Tracker to understand how you are faring.
Easily access over 45 different review platforms in order to build your online presence.
Need an instant, straightforward SEO analysis of your page, with action items that you can use to further optimize your performance? These guys do a great job of setting aside a lot of the industry jargon so that individuals can be empowered to take their sites into their own hands, along with training new professionals and saving seasoned veterans plenty of time.
Quickly assess how well your page follows Google guidelines for accessibility, security, and more.
Unamo offers tools that can tell you more about SEO (focusing on keywords, backlinks, and your competitors) as well as site traffic and social media signals.
Keep your finger on the pulse of what's trending via blogs and social media.
Our senior creative strategist is half fascinated, half obsessed with Google Trends. Deceptively simple, this tool can speak volumes in terms of comparing the importance of terms over times, in different geographies, and across different media platforms.
Standing as a great SEO project management tool, TopVisor lets you research keywords, track rankings, crawl sites, and run analytics on-demand. We’re big fans of the ability to perform everything from website audits through keyword research, all from one place.
Enable this Labs feature, then use these stored email templates when conducting manual email outreach.
Analyze the keywords that are aiding your competitors as well as those dominating your niche, and then use this tool to generate new keyword variations.
Monitor daily ranking data on the top 250 results, across desktop, mobile, and tablet. This includes local rankings down to the city and zip-code level.
Cloud-based platforms for SEO tracking help combat limitations resulting from IP blocking. This is a comprehensive powerhouse of a dashboard that spans key SEO tracking, competitor research, B2B-oriented features, and even social media insights.
Run SEO checkups for key on-page factors, analyze competitors, and check for broken links. Easily generate a sitemap that you can upload to GMT and rank higher. This platform can be flexibly tailored to meet your business’ needs - including in terms of pricing. Excellent customer support also sets these guys apart.
International keyword research, widely celebrated for its wide range of abilities (beyond suggestions) that combine the capabilities of several other tools available from other companies, including revealing low-competition keywords as well as searching via YouTube, Ebay, and Amazon.
Quickly assess whether your site is mobile-friendly using this browser-based URL checker
Use this handy Gmail plugin to easily access details regarding your contacts, making rich replies easy as you immediately recall what people do, where they live, and even have social media links at your fingertips so you can easily dive into more details.
ProRankTracker claims to have the most accurate algorithm out of any rank tracking software, allowing you to get up-to-date, real-time SERP data.
Optimization is key with Squirrly. Offering up SEO advice as you type, this tool helps you optimize in real time. It also tracks the performance of your content - including SEO, authority, traffic, and social media - and then gives you actionable recommendations.
This tool allows you to prospect - not just for link building, but even for sales! - from over 80 sources.
With powerful influencer research capabilities, NinjaOutreach is able to survey across social media and even podcasts.
Use MuckRack to pitch story ideas to journalists that will earn you the breadth of coverage you seek! Also features project management elements, as you can monitor coverage of your brand, niche, and any hot news.
Examine your performance as well as those of your competitors in terms of keywords, links, and mentions, not just on sites but also via social media.
Use the OSE to run a detailed link analysis of your site and then run it against those of your competitors.
Keep critical SEO data right at your fingertips with the Mozbar. Examine page metrics and keyword performances within the context of the page.
Use Twitter Analytics to find and grow within your niche, and strategically expand your list of followers through high-quality relationship-building.
Monitor the backlinks and keyword rankings of both you and your competitors. Fully automate this tracking, and receive alerts at the pace you prefer.
Start off by monitoring your brand's performance online and across social media platforms; then, track your competitors. You can schedule automatic reports to be sent to you as well.
With its renowned Historic Index and Fresh Index (last 90 days), Majestic is a fantastic option for keeping track of every backlink to your site, ever.
Low-cost solution for sending cold emails. MailShake has tested templates to help you rapidly optimize your sending, and also offers the capability to track click rates and send automatic follow-ups.
Compare your keyword phrases as well as on-page factors (link count, title text, Flash usage, etc.) with those of your competitors.
Are you afraid that unsolicited spammy linkers and social signals are messing up your rankings? Use this tool to clean it up.
This powerful link prospecting tool offers a wide range of parameters that you can adjust alongside your keywords to help make sure you find exactly the targets you've been looking for.
With Google’s rules constantly changing, it can be difficult to manage all of the links on your site, particularly if you have an active blog, lots of sub-pages, etc. Use this tool to rapidly fix your links!
Find low-competition long tail keywords, with options for location and language settings.
Need help with keyword brainstorming? This extension aids you with search volume, cost per click, and competition data that you can download in several convenient file formats, or that you can add into most major keyword research tools.
Starting off with keyword analysis, backlink profiles, and the ability for penalty recovery, Kerboo is a powerful SEO tool. You can search other sites by keyword, email address, or even IP and learn more about the people behind them. New in 2017 is a prospect gathering enhancement that allows you to identify key influences for your campaigns.
With seamless Hubspot integration, use this platform to generate rich, beautiful landing pages that will aid your outreach conversion numbers.
Search by domain and easily find contact information for top influencers anywhere.
Run CSV reports to quickly check long lists of URLs for status code, redirect, response time, and more.
Assess how quickly your site loads along with actionable recommendations for optimization.
With manual link import and Google Analytics integration, you can designate favorites and easily flag .gov/.edu links, and you can also discover which linkers generate the most traffic. FLF has an easy "Disavow" list generator.
View your traffic in terms of Penguin, Panda, and Mobile-Friendly Google changes to gauge whether you’ve been hit with penalties.
You can not only find the hottest content topics in your vertical, but manage all of your searches over time.
Onpage.org’s ZOOM prides itself on providing you with clean reporting on the technical SEO critical to your site, analyzing site indexability through content. ZOOm also helps manage your digital assets, so you can optimize your images, video, PDFs, and JS/CSS.
Find the best prospects for your campaigns using their proprietary SPAM algorithm incorporating 17 SPAM signals.
This tool rapidly scans your site code to objectively assess page load speed.
Worth checking out to see if this dashboard fits your style. You can track rankings, monitor backlinks, and recover your site from Penguin penalties.
With easy integration into product management tools like Optimizely and Asana, Clearbit provides you with contact databases so you can easily target the influencers you need to boost the reach of your content.
This extension helps you track number of links, social media shares (all platforms excluding Twitter and Facebook), and search rankings for whichever URL you currently have open in your browser.
This extension runs a detailed SEO analysis - of both on- and off-page elements - on whichever web page is open in the browser.
This extension detects redirects and error pages to help improve SEO rankings.
Quickly access the fundamental SEO statistics for any page your visiting, once you have this extension installed and activated in your browser.
CML crawls through your site and checks all links to make sure they’re not broken.
The browser extension that allows you to easily apply Buzzstream functionality to your daily workflow, this helps you add sites, find contacts, and launch outreach campaigns directly from your browser.
This tool lets you know what was used to build a particular site: what hosting company, content management system, analytics platforms, shopping carts, et al.
Rapidly access - in Excel - Majestic, Moz, and Grepwords data for URLs of interest.
Plug in to Google Analytics while on this page, so that you can quickly assess whether Google’s recent algorithm changes have negatively impacted your site in any way.
Find the key influencers and authority blogs online - along with contact information - and sort by various parameters including PR, social media followers, and proprietary scoring.
Monitor the performance of your keywords as well as your rankings, for both your domains and your competitors, in one easy dashboard.
The WayBack Machine is indispensable for checking on the original identity of a broken link.
Enter a seed keyword, a geographic location, and even a time period to obtain longtail keyword suggestions, not just in Google but extending to Amazon and YouTube as well. Additionally, Word Tracker offers negative keyword information.
Use this tool to examine your link profile and quickly disavow any bad links. You can set up alerts to manage domain/URL mentions, explore the backlinks for any site, and discover the hottest keywords and associated content.
If you had to pick one, it makes sense to use the leading search engine’s tools in order to plan out your keywords.
Dig deep into YouTube keyword research.
We cannot say enough good things about the value of Yesware, but then again, we are big-time data nerds. Use Yesware to monitor your email and open rates, so you can adjust your subject lines and messaging accordingly, and check the number of times links and attachments have been opened. Obtain data you can directly link to action items that help you do the best outreach job possible.
This tool helps you develop the robots.txt file that search engines then use when accessing your site. It can also help you block SPAM-bots from crawling for email addresses.
Incorporating more strategy than your average keyword research tool, the Niche Finder gives you structured keyword suggestions that can help you design your site better in terms of both content and architecture.
This tool helps you assemble clusters of keywords that are semantically related.
Leveraging a database of over a billion top keywords, this is a great starting point for keyword research and brainstorming.
If prospecting gives you a long list of URLs, use this to open up the whole list.
Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) is the aim of Traackr, and it’s an extremely popular platform for researching key influencers. Traackr features a wide reach of articles and a sophisticated ranking system. Though its platform can be a bit tricky to navigate at first, Traackr has an excellent support staff onhand to make sure you get the most out of the product.
Soovle is a comprehensive search tool that combines the major search providers’ SERPs into one, easy-to-view dashboard. This is super helpful when conducting keyword research, and needing to understand the nuances of different searches' performance across providers.
Quickly scan URLs for duplicate content, broken links, and other factors that might negatively impact your rankings.
Check your performance alongside those of your competitors, and get valuable traffic and marketing insights as you look up any URL, industry, or country. SimilarWeb really shines for its data visualization capabilities, which complements well the treasure trove of data that it offers.
This tool provides you with a concise backlinks report of the most critical aspects of each backlink, including anchor text, PR, number of outbound links, whether the backlink is live, and whether the link is a “nofollow”/“noindex.”
Rapidly check a list of URLs for DA, PA, and IP address.
Great for smaller agencies, this is a strategic set of tools that you can use to get essential SEO data to navigate you to success and features Majestic integration. With spreadsheets as its main output, this tool set lets you run competitor analysis, schedule regular reports to track your rankings on major search engines, and crawl your site to check for any issues and/or room for optimization.
Look up the statistics behind a particular keyword so that you can understand how often particular keywords are searched for, and understand the relative proportions of searches that belong to each one.
Consider this to be a one-stop check-up of 100 site data points, with resulting recommendations designed to improve your SEO.
A great option if you want to construct detailed reports of your backlink profiles.
This tool has you construct a scenario for your proposed search query - for which you’d like your site to be the number one find - and uses that to develop out a list of related keywords… while also having you share this scenario with your contacts to understand how they would perform the same search.
Touting itself as the "Swiss Army Knife" of SEO, ScrapeBox lets you harvest URLs and keywords. We love the link checker tool as well, which helps you verify backlinks and anchor text. There are additional tools you can download to meet your specific needs.
Your site is not just about text - it’s easy to forget that image attributes are important as well! Use this tool to swiftly add ALT and TITLE to your images.
Centered around the concept of a “content relevancy score,” use nTopic to sharpen your existing content by finding similar terms and rounding out the content, or else by omitting off-topic terms.
This CRM focuses on social media, and empowers you to control the pace of your interactions. You import your contacts from email and social media, and from there you can edit details about them as well as quickly review your history of interacting with them. You can also quickly monitor your social media brand mentions.
With a wide range of economic pricing options, this platform lets you track your keywords and generate reports - even white label. One of their plans must be a good fit for your budget, while offering you extensive data packaged neatly into a dashboard that helps you quickly refer to your site/SEO performance data and make good decisions with minimal headache. Their rankings analytics scans across multiple search engines to give you a more realistic view of the data.
MarketSamurai carries a range of nifty features that can help you develop better ideas for keywords, domains, ads, and content.
Find out not just about direct links instantly, but also detect mentions on social media as well as review platforms so you can keep a close eye on your band.
Quickly identify the strongest subpage within a domain so that you know exactly where to best pitch your site.
Using cached data, rapidly assess the backlink profile for any page of interest.
Use this to review your competitors' backlink profiles and quickly identify from which domains you haven't earned links...yet.
Use this functionality to quickly determine if a link opportunity is risky or not.
Need to expand your list of linkbuilding targets? Use the LJT to see the sites your competitors are linking to.
Easily recuperate broken links if you've recently relaunched a website or bought an expired domain.
Worried about Penguin? DTOX will help you address Google penalties, and even help you figure out where to begin in avoiding them by helping you rank your risks in terms of imminence.
Worried that you're linkbuilding too quickly? This tool helps ensure that your pace is on-point to prevent penalties.
Quickly compare your backlink profile to that of up to 10 of your competitors.
Quickly obtain the contact information you need so you can conduct outreach.
Help understand your competitors' backlink profiles in terms of the risks associated with the links they build. Understand the vulnerabilities of your niche, and leverage the least risky links.
Obtaining data from 24 data sources and over 97 parameters per data point, this is a powerful tool for compiling backlink reports - including detecting deleted links. You can also use their Link Redirect Trace tool to control damage from any existing redirect chains.
Keyword Tool Dominator uses the Autocomplete databases to mine for keyword suggestions and help you find effective new avenues to reach your target audiences.
Centering around keywords, this tool tracks keyword performance and gives you insight into your competitors and their keywords, ad copy, and Adwords spending.
Pick the ripe yet low-hanging fruit by using this tool. Clean out the keywords with low competition in your niche of interest; find the keywords with high search volume and low CPC. With great visualizations to help you brainstorm keywords effectively as well as quickly view ranking difficulty, KeywordRevealer can help you keep your keyword strategy organized.
This is one of the best options for combining up to three different lists of terms. You can choose to include quotes, brackets, spaces, and also remove duplicates from the resulting list.
Simple but sweet, search by keyword or topic and language to quickly find related keywords and phrases.You have the option to save and export keywords, as well as filter by number of words. This is a really great tool if you're just starting out and don't want to commit to some of the other paid tools.
Based on your categories of interest, this service matches you with relevant bloggers so that you can save time - these are interested bloggers who will reply. Jamballa touts itself as being on the bloggers' side, so that they don't get bombarded with low-value offers. To serve those seeking to use Jamballa for outreach, they've made their service pay-as-you-go.
Learn more about how many websites are ranked for a particular keyword using this tool. Jaaxy offers alternative views for searching for, saving, and organizing your keywords. Since they do offer a trial version, you can take it for a spin and see if it fits into your workflow.
Find better bloggers and Twitter followers to target, and then manage your outreach campaigns with real-time tracking of outcomes: interactions with influencers, mentions of your brand, and even site traffic data.
This tool analyzes social media signals - shares, views, you name it! - to understand what content is making an impact as well as how great that impact really is. This platform works across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Choose from a list of business types and get a list of suggested keywords based on locations. This tool is good for beginners who might need some help understanding how to structure comprehensive queries for local.
A leading all-in-one SEO software provider, gShift is the only SEO software platform that monitors and reports on a brand’s web presence - down through the content level - daily, with data from organic search (domestic and international), social media, and even mobile engagement. Track your competitors to gain insights for where you can grow.
Find the top bloggers and influencers in your niche. GroupHigh contains over 15 million blogs, with plenty of data parameters associated so that you can segment out exactly whom you need.
Ginza gives you the data you need to design smart content marketing campaigns that make SEO sense. Their powerful keyword discovery tool combined with their content assessments and data-driven optimization suggestions provides you with top insights. They gather competitor insights and crawl popular search engines daily.
Search by URL to check for duplicates of your site. Make sure no one is plagiarising your content and stealing your juice.
Find contact information for key influencers as well as manage outreach campaigns in this one-stop shop. BuzzStream also excels at analytics, helping you understand what's driving your success as well as where you can improve.
Scan all of the internal and external URLs on a set of pages to check for broken links.
Schedule emails to be sent at a later time of your choice, as well as reminders for you to follow up; Boomerang is particularly helpful when you conduct manual outreach. Additionally, their newest feature - "Respondable" - helps grade your emails based on how likely they are to receive a reply, providing you some additional parameters for optimization.
Reporting and diagnostic tools to understand how your site interacts with the search engine… straight from the search engine’s mouth.
Use BigOutreach - and its global reach - to connect with not only bloggers, but also journalists and copywriters abroad so that you can add quality content and diverse perspectives to your Digital PR campaigns.
Use this to generate the hreflang tags you need for appropriate language and country versioning of your pages, per Google’s rules.
This comprehensive dashboard revolves around backlink analysis, crawling pages and comparing yours with your competitors’. With reporting and project management features, you can even manage emails using this platform.
No-frills examination of basic SEO data upon submission of a list of URLs, which can be downloaded as spreadsheets and manipulated further. Works on both PCs and Macs!
With a focus on local SEO, this platform helps you collect data on your site to drive your optimization, with a focus on local signals. UpCity also gives you a one-stop shop that lets you swiftly align all of your brand's signals as you publish local reviews/ratings and even manage your social media profiles.
At quick glance, access PageRank, number of links, page links, directory links, page age, and site traffic - the key data points used by Google and Bing to rank your page. You also have the option to dig deeper and even export data as a CSV.
This tool helps check the health of your robots.txt file to make sure it adheres to the Robot Exclusion Standard.
Along with the standard keyword suggestion capability, Term Explorer lets you export data for up to 90,000 items. Its easy sorting capability lets you examine search volume, cost per click, and PPC competition, all alongside link volume & statistics numbers in one easy to navigate view.
Optimize your Google snippets without needing to download anything!
Keep an eye out for changes in SERP results across Google and Bing, over the past day as well as the past month, to understand search engine volatility. Particularly useful for tracking the impact of searchalgorithm changes. API is provided, so you can easily integrate this with your other tools.
For very fast on- and off-page SEO calculations. Use or build your own connectors to extend SEO Tools' functionality and integrate APIs into Excel. Only works with Windows and Excel.
Feed up to three lists of footprint components to this page, and generate plain text of all possible permutations of those lists using broad, phrase, or exact match syntax.
Run a quick search on a particular URL to understand what is immediately visible to search engines, and help further inform your strategy.
Search Latte is particularly useful for international SERPs, as it lets you search on Google using different parameters including TLD, Country, and Language.
With new features constantly being added on to this browser extension, and integrating only with Ahrefs for now (so you must have an Ahrefs account), this tool provides you with a detailed analysis of linkers and allows you to quickly access and process the reports.
Right Inbox allows you to track emails for link building outreach, set up recurring emails,and automate follow up emails so you never miss an important email again. Link builders have such a busy inbox so it's a given that emails get lost in all the clutter sometimes. Never lose track of a link outreach email again with the automatic reminders in Gmail feature.
Grab a quick backlink analysis of any site using this browser-based tool.
Use this browser extension to crawl the links on a page and find any broken ones, listed with the number of links pointing to that URL as well as to the domain.
Use this tool to optimize the formatting of your business listings for Google Search using the JSON-LD version of Schema markup.
Be sure to expand the options to access the full list of parameters by which you can adjust the combinations of keywords. Combine up to three separate lists of words, adjusting what separates them with a few straightforward settings. The clean UI seals the deal on rendering this our favorite keyword combining tool.
Find out which keywords are trending on Google, Amazon, and Youtube while also analyzing your competitors’ keywords.
Incorporating latent semantic indexing (LSI) to your keyword planning approach, LSI Graph takes a different sort of data-driven approach to keyword suggestion.
One of the most highly respected tools for discovering new keywords as wells as understanding their competitiveness and profitability.
Keyword Tool harnesses the power for Google Suggest to conduct keyword research that's applicable across multiple platforms: Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and App Store. The free version offers 750+ keywords per query, while the paid version offers even more.
Another tool that aspires to help you leverage untapped keywords in your niche, Keyword Snatcher also lets you incorporate local search terms.
Combine up to 9 different lists - along with adding on the appropriate Google syntax for everything from broad through exact matches - to generate lists of key phrases for your searches. Great way to adapt your existing footprints to particular niches.
Perform a quick check for your XML sitemap to check for broken links.
Made for Windows only, this tool offers on-demand reporting of site crawls checking for broken links, images, frames, and backgrounds. It supports SSL sites, FTP, and gopher sites, while also capable of reporting redirects.
API-first application that adds keyword research to your favorite tools. Review the list of extensions and plugins at http://grepwords.com/tools-plugins/.
Quick scan your pages to test adherence to Google Webmaster guidelines, while also receiving information on traffic & popularity.
Research the keywords being used for searches on Google, Bing, Amazon, Google Market, Ebay, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Etsy, purportedly reflecting trends in real-time. Data can be copied to your clipboard or even exported as a CSV.
This super simple tool from Distilled lets you quickly create disavowal files and test them against lists of URLs to ensure they work as desired.
The industry leader in content research, influencer discovery, and monitoring, Buzzsumo is a powerful tool for assessing and strategizing your content by identifying how it performs with audiences and presenting this data in easy-to-follow, visually dynamic ways.
While we don't recommend relying solely on broken link building, depending on your niche it might help you earn some links. Use this tool to search for broken or dead links in your topic area of choice.
Just enter in words relating to your interest(s), and Answer the Public will generate related suggestions and questions, with a couple of options for visualizations and data organization to help keep you organized.
