Many businesses invest hundreds of thousands and even millions into marketing every year but the results are not commensurate to their investment. SEO is a particularly tricky aspect of marketing because of how volatile it is: trends change quickly and search algorithms are not always consistent either.
In this article, we will introduce you to some key SEO tools that can help you derive maximum value from your marketing ROI. These tools can help you analyze your website performance, identify and fix issues, conduct keyword research, optimize your content, track your rankings, and more.
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Eye10
With a target to supercharge your marketing ROI, Eye10 is one of the most affordable SEO toolkits to enhance your website and brand visibility online. The Eye10 suite focuses on the most essential services for getting your SEO game up and challenging your competitors. The tools included in the suite are Competitor Research, Keyword Planner, Backlink Monitor, Backlink Checker, Rank Checker, On-Page SEO, Industry Checker, and Pagespeed.
So, regardless of the size of your business, your SEO base is entirely covered by using Eye10. More so, with a selection of 12 languages and counting, Eye10 serves a very wide market. Results are generated from real-time data to help you make informed decisions about your brand’s marketing. Eye10 is more than a report-generating product; it is an expert-backed assistance toolkit.
Seeing as the cost of SEO software is a huge barrier for many businesses, Eye10 aims to be a vibrant package for small businesses. As against other services whose subscriptions begin at an average of $100, a subscription to Eye10 costs only $39 per month. This gives you access to all the tools in the Eye10 suite and it is ideal for those just getting started with SEO. For expert SEO professionals and marketers, there is a higher subscription tier that costs $99 monthly. Each of the subscription tiers comes with a 3-day subsidized trial for only $3.
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Buzzstream
Buzzstream is one of the most popular link-building tools available. It is a CRM platform for conducting link-building outreaches to grow your digital PR results. Buzzstream provides assistance right from the prospecting stage, helping you build qualified lists of influencers, bloggers, editors, and promoters.
To help you achieve effective link building, Buzzstream has a number of free tools for email research as well as simple but boring tasks such as extracting domains from URLs or links from HTML, among others. However, its main tools for PR, link building, and content promotion require a subscription although there is a 14-day free trial.
At $24 per month, you get access to 1,000 contacts as well as email templates, scheduling, automated follow-ups, publisher and influencer metrics, link monitoring, and a browser extension. However, the fuller range of features, giving you access to up to 25,000 contacts costs $124 monthly. Businesses requiring advanced analytics and extensive customizability would have to spend up to $300.
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Moz
Moz is an SEO software platform that provides multiple solutions for SEO marketers. This includes site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and keyword research. There is also the Moz Local feature which helps businesses monitor and enhance their listings across various online directories. All these make Moz an attractive option for small and mid-size businesses. However, only the biggest organizations can access its fuller range of SEO features and tools.
Moz Pro subscriptions come with a free 30-day trial and once it ends, a standard subscription comes at the rate of $99 monthly. A Pro Medium subscription costs $179 while the highest premium tier will set you back a huge $539 monthly. Each of these tiers comes with a variety of limitations as to the number and kinds of results you can access. With a standard subscription, you can’t crawl more than 400,000 total pages monthly or make more than 5,000 backlink queries. At the highest tier, those increase to 8 million pages and 100,000 queries per month.
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Google Search Console
If you wanted to enhance your website’s rankings on Google Search, it is perhaps a no-brainer that Google’s own tools should be your first port of call. And Google does have several tools that help with SEO: Analytics, Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights, etc. However, Google Search Consol stands out.
Originally known as Google Webmaster Tools because its main focus was website developers, it adopted its new name as it became clear that more people wanted access to its features who were not programmers. As such, Google Search Console, as it is now, is much more accessible than it used to be. Search Console is a collection of various tools and reports that measure your site’s traffic and performance in Google Search results.
Unlike the other tools on this list, Search Console is not a marketing tool. However, it provides features that help you to raise your digital marketing profile through SEO. For instance, Search Console is what you use to submit sitemaps to Google for crawling, ensuring that Google has a clear view of your site for accurate ranking. It is also the platform through which Google alerts you once it identifies issues on your site. More so, Search Console is completely free; so this is something every SEO marketer should be using.
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Ahrefs
Ahrefs has a very loyal audience base because its system works similarly to search engines, crawling the entire web independently and generating live results and information. So, the strength of Ahrefs is its backend infrastructure which is spread over hundreds of thousands of servers.
With a vast content index, Ahrefs has created several useful tools for SEO analysis including major tools for analyzing your competitors, auditing and optimizing your website, finding keywords, discovering content ideas, and tracking your ranking progress.
All of this comes at a price, though. An Ahrefs subscription starts at $99 per month and can go up to $399 monthly if you select the advanced plan. However, there is a streamlined version called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which is totally free. It works similarly to Google Search Console and allows you to monitor your SEO health once you have confirmed ownership of your site. There are also a host of other free tools for checking backlinks, broken links, and website authority.
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Semrush
Semrush is not primarily an SEO tool; rather, it is a platform that tries to address the full range of marketing needs for businesses trying to manage their online visibility.
On the SEO end, Semrush focuses on four primary areas: competitor research, keyword research, link building, and on-page & tech SEO. Beyond SEO, Semrush also boasts tools for advertising, social media, content marketing, and agency solutions. Combined, Semrush has over 55 tools and reports to help marketers gain insights into their progress
Once the free trial period is over, the minimum subscription for Semrush costs $120 and it gives you access to a limited set of tools. More so, you can only set up 5 projects, track up to 500 keywords, and generate 10,000 results per report. More capacity is enabled at $230 and $450 monthly, the latter of which targets large enterprises.
Conclusion
SEO is a powerful way to improve your marketing ROI, but it can also be challenging and complex, especially if there is a mismatch between the tools you are using and the needs you need to address. Given the broad nature of SEO, it is highly likely that you won’t simply be using one tool; most marketers use a diversity of tools for various aspects of SEO.
However, for maximum cost-effectiveness, starting with free tools such as Google Search Console and affordable ones such as Eye10 and Buzzstream sets you on the trail to succeed.
Interesting Related Article: “11 of the Best Free SEO Tools“