First page rankings on Google are becoming more difficult to acquire. Achieving results through manual actions on a smaller scale is possible, however for large-scale projects the use of tools will prove valuable. Below are some of the following tools that can help your SEO campaign.
Scrapebox
Scrapebox is referred to as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ in SEO. The tool boasts a wide range of features that include:
- The ability to scrape data from web platforms.
- The ability to search for organic ranking results.
- Has the ability to scale link building efforts by publishing comments and adding to discussion threads to scale.
One of the setbacks with this tool is that is widely used by the Black hat SEO community. Rather than automate thousands of comments that can be fired through to blogs, directories and forums, use the tool to identify prospects that are likely to accept content contributions from your website.
Citation Labs
Citation Labs Link Prospector and Broken Link Builder are great for finding new link acquisition opportunities. Link Prospector automates search queries to find opportunities for:
- Directories
- Guest blog posts
- Reviews
- Giveaways
- Commenting
- Interviews
- Donations
- Link Pages
Broken Link Builder goes a step further by searching for broken external link opportunities on websites. When these opportunities are found, web content can be pitched to replace the missing content.
Xenu Link Sleuth
This free tool is an oldie, but goldie. Mainly used to identify 301 and 302 redirects, 404 broken link errors and 500 errors across a website. Fixing these errors on the site can improve its SEO performance. Another clever use for the tool is by finding broken external link opportunities on other websites. Identifying these create an opportunity to:
1. Contact the webmaster and advise them of the broken link. You can offer similar content that they can link to from their site.
2. Find the web domain to see if the content still exists and pitch your related content to them as a replacement for the content that was on that site.
3. If the web domain is expired, it could be bought and turned into a micro website.
Google Search Console
This free tool that’s provided by Google helps SEOs keep their fingers on the pulse of websites that they are managing in their campaign. If there are any major issues affecting the website’s ability to rank, you can usually identify those issues in the Google Search Console. Look out for:
- Duplicate tags (including meta descriptions and page titles)
- Broken links
- Links that are pointing to your website.
- Any alerts from Google about the performance of your website.
- Managing the appearance of your website in search engines. (For example, using structured data or sitelinks.
SEMRush
Finding keyword opportunities is the key to gaining quick wins in organic search. Millions of websites compete for the same keyword and those that can get insight on new keyword trends and niches will have a better chance of getting web traffic that engages and converts with their web content. SEMRush is a must-have tool for any SEO that is serious about conducting keyword research to uncover hidden keyword opportunities. Some of the insights include:
- Exact phrase keyword matches.
- Related/suggested keyword phrases.
- Competitor analysis
- Paid search keyword analysis
Pingdom Tools
Page loading times have always been a factor that affects both the user experience and SEO performance. Pingdom allows webmasters to see how quickly their web content is being downloaded and at what sequence it is being loaded. If the web page is loading too slow, customisations can be made to the web files and CSS on the site.
These are a few SEO tools that will help to optimise your website’s content, technical stability and link building activities, so your site will have the best chance to acquire page 1 rankings.