What is it?
It’s quite the balancing act between SEO tools that are baked firmly into your process and integrating new tools to keep up with trends and provide improved value. Of course, it’s always nice to mess about with a tool because someone on SEO Twitter got overly excited about it.
Anyway, have a gander at the tools below and let us know what you think or share any new tools you’ve recently come across in the SEO space.
LOWFRUITS – KEYWORD RESEARCH
What they say it does: “Still analyzing SERPs manually to find weak spots?
Identify profitable keywords you can actually rank for in just a few clicks.
What we say it does: “Maybe the easiest, most intuitive keyword research tool we’ve come across recently. Cheap, too.”
Alternatives: SEMrush.
Cost: Cheapest monthly subscription is $20 per month
PANGUIN – SEO DATA ANALYSIS
What they say it does: “A free SEO tool to help you investigate whether you’ve been impacted by Google’s algorithm updates.”
What we say it does: “Connect GA and BAM! – you get to see your organic users over your chosen time period with various Google updates plotted along the chart. Remember kids – correlation doesn’t mean causation, but it’s a nice talking point in tech audits.”
Alternatives: Cross referencing GA and GSC with Google updates. Of course, you’ll still want to do this if you see something’s awry.
Cost: Free
DOMAIN MIGRATION DATA STUDIO DASHBOARD
What they say it does: “The Data Studio dashboard gives you an easy side by side comparison of the old and new domain as part of your migration, monitoring clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. These sections compare the date selected with the previous period.”
What we say it does: “A great one-pager visualization to show pre-launch and post-launch migration performance. The kind of report that clients not only look at, but also get their higher-ups to look at, too.”
Alternatives: Your analytics / data analysis team. Trust me, they’ll thank you for not bothering them to build one of these out from scratch.
Cost: Free
Httpstatuschecker.io – REDIRECT CHECKER
What they say it does: “Easily check status codes, response headers, and redirect chains.”
What we say it does: “While it does what they say it does, we like it for quickly spot-checking canonical redirects – y’know, http > https and www vs. non-www.”
Alternatives: Sitebulb – well, the initial canonical domain check. Although, it doesn’t show the full path, and setting up a new project in order to do it is hardly a quick spot-check!
Cost: Free
SEO ARCADE – ROI SEO FORECASTING
Disclosure: This is one of our consultant’s side hustles. However, we use it fairly extensively here at Hive because we obviously ‘negotiated’ a decent rate with Jeremy. But, I’d personally use it whether I was working with him or not!
What they say it does: “We gather the top 100 keywords for the 10 URLs that rank right now for your target keyword giving you up to 1,000 super relevant terms and phrases along with their search volume & CPC data. Then we forecast how much SEO traffic, sales & revenue your could capture if you ranked organically in search. We help you grow your revenue by potentially thousands of dollars per month with our in-depth keyword research. We also show you how each keyword, in each ranking position 1-10 would fare.”
What we say it does: “SEO’s Achilles heel is its inherent inability or reluctance to forecast a return on investment. No forecast will ever be 100% correct, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold our efforts accountable. These forecasts are extremely valuable in that they also include researched keywords to optimize.
Alternatives: futurethought.io; SearchPilot; BrightEdge
Cost: $30 per report; subscriptions available
