The Best SEO Monitoring Tools Experts Use. Free & Paid

Last Updated on April 17, 2020 by

Like any job, having the right tools can be the difference between massive success and wasting time. When it comes to digital marketing, search engine optimization specifically, having the right tools is often what helps the most successful companies perform better in the SERPs than their competitors. So, what are the best SEO monitoring tools that can help a business or digital marketer improve the SEO strategy they’re working on?

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The answer to that question greatly depends on the needs of your SEO campaign, your budget, and your preferences. Some of you might be looking for tools that will produce immediate results within a specific time frame. Others of you have a no budget, so you’re trying to find free tools; while some of you are willing to spend $1-3k a month on the SEO tools you need. Do you want a tool that is software based, or do you want a tool that is 100% hosted online (in the cloud) so that it can be accessed from any computer, in any location?

Without you providing us with that information, it’s hard for us to identify what the best tools are for you specifically, but we will list some of our favorite tools that we use along with our SEO expertise.

– Favorite SEO Keyword Ranking Monitoring Tools

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Our favorite tool to use to monitor keyword rankings is by far:

Rank Tracker by Link Assistant:

The thing we love about Rank Tracker is that there is no limit to the number of keywords you can track and analyze. Many of the platforms that are hosted on the cloud require that you pay a certain price per number of keywords.

Additionally, Rank Tracker is regularly updated to make sure that when it’s checking the search engine rankings for a given set of keywords, the software developer is very active in making sure this program stays up to date with any changes that search engines make in a countless number of languages.

Of course, some features are so useful to an SEO expert that they can’t be overlooked. Things like:

– Competitor keyword rank monitoring.

– Keyword difficulty analysis.

– Integration with Google Analytics & Google Adwords

– It’s multithreaded, meaning that it can search a large set of keywords pretty quickly. Additionally, the rank checking can be set to automatically run whenever the user dictates.

Aside from those features above, there is a very long list of features that might be useful to you tracking your keyword rankings, but these are just a few of them that we appreciate the most.

– Favorite SEO Backlink Monitoring Tools

We use a number of tools, and for that reason, we cannot choose just one. So what we’ll do is list all 3 of them, and specify how and why we use all of them.

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Ahrefs:

Compared to any other online repository of backlinks, Ahrefs has consistently been able to find the widest variety of links. What is great about this is it allows it’s users that are doing research on the link building profile of their competitors to find a way to analyze the numbers quickly.

Additionally, it’s an excellent way to see what many of the keywords a particular domain or page is ranking for within a matter of seconds.

Majestic:

When it comes to getting an idea of how relevant backlinks are for a page, Majestic does a GREAT job of this with their Topical Trust Flow. What makes this aspect of their backlink analysis so important and useful is the fact that you can get a pretty good idea of the subject and relevancy of any backlink(s) a particular site or page has. Since we all know relevancy is by far one of the most important aspects of backlinks… it goes without saying how valuable this information is.

SEO SpyGlass by Link Assistant:

Another feature heavy tool that is amazingly powerful, but it’s a desktop application. One of the most useful features of this tool is the fact that it has no limit to the number of websites you can analyze for backlinks. Also, it does a great job of finding backlink opportunities that your competitors have that you do not.

Imagine having a website that ranks top10 for one of your priority keywords on Google.com, and you’re having a hard time identifying which backlinks to pursue to help move the needle for that given term. Using SEO Spyglass, you can take 5 or even all 9 of the other competitors ranking on page one of Google and find which websites link to more than one of them; finding the backlink opportunities that your competitors share but you do not have. Often, those are the most powerful backlinks to have, and can drastically move the needle when it comes to improving search engine rankings.

We don’t know of any other tool that currently has that functionality; without any limits.

– Some Of The Best On-Page SEO Tools

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Much of the on-page analysis and recommendations we work with does not come from software, but from the great minds and analysis of real people. With that said, there are times that we might use a tool to have it quickly make a comparison of the on-page optimizations that we’ve come up with; so we’ll mention two of them below:

Screaming Frog:

This desktop application is nothing more than a crawler/scraper that will visit every page of a website and both download and categorize all of the different elements of each page it finds. While it will not provide recommendations that will help with on-page SEO per se… it’s perfect for doing technical audits, finding issues with a given website, or simply to “spy” on the on-page elements that a competitor might be using and succeeding with.

Website Auditor by Link Assistant:

Another desktop software that we often use to identify issues that a site might have from a technical SEO standpoint, or from a usability and UI perspective. On the other hand, one of our favorite features of this software is the fact that it will make an on-page SEO comparison between your website and up to 10 of the top30 ranking sites for any keyword(s) you are targeting.

This is very useful to get a sense of the types of on-page aspects that a search engine is looking for in it’s highest ranking websites.

– Tools For Monitoring Social Media Signals

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Sadly, this is one of the most overlooked aspects when it comes to succeeding with off-page SEO; and that’s mainly because people don’t talk about this subject as much as they used to… coupled with the fact that people don’t know how to adequately improve their social presence online. To both understand and get an idea of how competitors are using social media to improve their organic rankings in the search engines is:

Link Assistant by Link Assistant: (lol… seriously)

Funny… I know. This software is focused on finding and building backlink opportunities, but one of its features that we use it for the most is taking websites that rank above our target website to see what their social media presence is like to determine how important that type of off-page strategy is.

– Some Of The Best SEO Keyword Research Tools

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One area of SEO that is done the wrong way and has been for years is keyword research. Just about anyone can identify keywords that they want to target and rank for; that’s the easy part. On the other hand, what they then struggle with is making sure they can rank for those terms within a reasonable amount of time. The ideal keyword strategy is one that doesn’t look at just the long-term goals for specific keywords. Instead, it’s when priority is also given to low hanging fruit that will result in increased organic traffic and rankings for terms that the target website can rank for within a matter of weeks, and sometimes even days.

Our favorite tool for identifying these types of opportunities is:

Long Tail Pro Platinum:

This might be surprising to some since most of the people that review and talk about this software aren’t in competitive B2B or B2C markets, but the principals still apply in just about any industry. Not only does this tool use one of the best platforms to get a sense of competitor’s backlink profiles, Majestic, but it also takes into consideration on-page elements, website age, and domain strength of top ranking sites. In addition that data, the software quickly analyzes the number of backlinks and domains that are looking to top ranking sites.

With all of this data compiled, the software provides what it calls a “keyword competitive score.” The benefit of this is that anytime an SEO analysis includes finding what keywords a site can easily rank for in the short term, largely based on that KC score, there is no way to fail with increasing organic traffic and rankings to positively impact revenue goals.

These are just some of the best SEO monitoring tools that our team of experts uses almost daily…

Does that mean that you should automatically go out and buy these tools, and start using them? Absolutely not! Instead, it’s important for you to get a sense of what you’re trying to accomplish with SEO first. From there you can determine which aspect of an SEO campaign you want to target, and IF there is a tool out there that will enable you to do that more efficiently and with greater success… consider using that tool to help you reach your goal.

Obviously, what we’ve said above about the tools listed on this page is not intended to be a review, a recommendation, or a detailed list of all the many features that these tools have; we’re just getting to the point of what we most commonly use them for.

If you need help trying to find the best SEO tool for a specific aspect of your digital marketing campaign, feel free to reach out to us by leaving a comment below or contacting us directly… and we’d love to help you find the SEO tool that can help you achieve your marketing goals. Nomvo!