Top marketing and SEO tools we use everyday!

Do you run a small marketing group?  Your leaders STILL not seeing the value of a professional SEO team? Here’s a great list of SEO tools to make your life a LOT easier!

Local Specific Tools

1. WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder:  This is the industry standard tool and it’s awesome. Basically, you can drop in your main key and city, it will go out and find your competitors and see what citations they have, rank the citation sources by DA (Domain Authority), and show you which ones you are missing.
2. Local SEO Checklist Easy checklist to make sure you have the bases covered + more.
3. Rich Snippet Validator (Google) Validate that rich snippets are working on your local site.
4.  Local SEO Quick Check (Moz) Quickly check where you stand with citations, duplicates, errors etc.
5. Free Review Monitoring: This will monitor your reviews, and you can track reviews of your competition.
6. Bluementhals Local Business Category Tool Cool tool to get all the categories you should be in on Google Places.
7. Tiny Ranker:  Keep track of your rankings and onpage SEO efforts

Keyword Research Tools

1. SEMRush SEMRush is a website research tool. You can check search engine or PPC stats on any website, see your rankings, or your competitors rankings.
   1.  Easy Wins Method: Put in your website URL. Under Organic Research on the left, click positions. See what you’re ranking for on page 2, re-optimize your pages or add links (internal or external) to boost your rank.
   2. Keyword Jacking Method: Get your competitors domains and run a keyword report on them. Sort the report by kw volume, jack their keywords and either add them to your existing pages or build out new pages. ] Here’s a quick example video for reference.
2. KWFinder Shows strength values that come from majestic (TF & CF), & Unique linking IPs for the top 10 results, as well as PR. ]You can use this in combination with all the keyword ideas you got from Semrush (item
3. UberSuggest This is basically a google suggest scraper. Find all kinds of long tails with this baby.

Backlink Analysis Tools

You can check the backlinks of any site with these tools. use them for all of the following: 1. Overview of what’s going on with a site (any anomalies etc) 2. Checking for over-optimization 3. Checking competitors to see if they have any good links / trying to jack competitors links 4. Doing general research on domains

1.  Ahrefs – Best at catching backlinks. Most accurate checker.
2.  Open Site Explorer – Most commonly used statistics for judging website power or strength, however DA & PA metrics scale with spam so you really need to look at the actual backlinks too.
3. Majestic – Best for determining websites trust / strength.
4. MOZ SEO Toolbar This  will automatically run stats for you on all the websites you visit and put an overlay in search results if you want. This is the quickest way to check stats as you’re browsing around.
5. Moz Bulk Domain Checker for Google Docs Want to check a bulk group of domains? With this easy tool, you can throw a bunch of domains into a google doc and quickly get the moz DA / PA for them.

SEO Analytics & Tracking

1. Google Analytics – Create a Google Analytics account and install the code on your webiste.
2. Fresh Metrix (Rank Tracking) Easy rank tracking for national and down to the local level. You can start for free and they have plans all the way up to the thousands of keywords. Serpfox (Rank Tracking) Nice & easy tool for rank tracking. Just plop in your URL, keywords and location and it will do all the tracking for you. They have a free plan as well if you’re just getting started.
3. Serpbook (Rank Tracking) Similar to serpfox but with nice white label and automated reporting. Penalty Research Panguin Tool You can connect your Google Analytics account and it will display when google updates happened so you can see if drops in traffic match any Google updates. Ultimate Guide To Google Update History All of the Google updates + what really happened + case studies.
4. Remove Anchor Text Over Optimization Checker Pretty self-explanatory.
5. Brand Building Lock My Brand Registers your brand name on the top social media websites in the world Building A PBN Expireddomains.net Great place for checking stats on upcoming auctions.
6. Waybackmachine You always should check what a site has been used for in the past, regardless of how good the backlinks are. Here you can see an archive of past uses.
7. Copyscape – Dupe Content Checker Make sure your content is original. You can use this for articles that your outsourcers have written for you, or check clients sites to make sure they don’t have any dupe.