…Before we start though, if SEO is not a familiar concept to you, check out our straightforward guide to what it is and how it works right here.
Ok, let’s get going:
Best Overall SEO Software: SEMRush
SEMrush helps companies run digital marketing strategies, such as (but not limited to) SEO campaigns. It can also manage pay-per-click (PPC), social media, and content marketing campaigns.
Use it to identify trends in your industry. It audits your on-page SEO on command and helps you improve your pages.
You can also use it to identify valuable keywords – learn which keywords your competition is using and how they rank in the search engines.
If you have limited experience (or no) SEO knowledge, SEMrush genuinely makes it easy for you to understand and use SEO.
Best Advanced SEO Software: Ahrefs
Ahrefs is best known for its backlink checker, because it has one of the largest databases of live links. It uses crawling software to recreate your site in the way a search engine would see it (which is fascinating, apart from anything else).
It gives you a dashboard that helps you keep track of all your data – you just add a URL to keep tabs on your domain health. The dashboard shows you errors, new links, URL ranking, and referring domains. It’s pretty comprehensive.
Best SEO Plugin for WordPress: Yoast
Yoast and WordPress grew up together, so they know each other pretty well. This means if you have a site built on WordPress, Yoast is your friend, as some of its capabilities are already integrated.
Yoast has built quite a few WordPress plugins over the years, the best-known of which (and easiest to get grips with) is Yoast SEO.
There’s a free and paid-for version of this, and, as you would expect, you get a lot more with the paid version. Mostly more AI, more keywords, automatic redirects (so no broken links, which harms your SEO), and real-time suggestions for internal links.
Best SEO Crawling Software: Screaming Frog
The animatedly-named Screaming Frog is a website crawling tool, which is designed to help businesses extract onsite data, audit SEO issues and analyse results in real-time.
Features include duplicate page detection, site visualisation, crawl scheduling, forms-based authentication, XML sitemap generation and reporting.
It means SEO professionals (and anyone who knows what they’re talking about) to crawl small or large websites, track broken links and server errors and export the source URLs to developers for correction.
Marketers, in particular, can analyse page title and meta descriptions, discover temporary and permanent redirects and detect blocked URLs through tag directives. It also lets you scrape data from the HTML of web pages using CSS Path, XPath or regular expressions (regex), which is extremely handy.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider integrates with third-party platforms including Google Analytics, Google Seach Console, PageSpeed and Link Metrics. It is available for free and on an annual subscription basis.
Best Outreach Software: Pitchbox
Pitchbox is specifically designed for in-house marketing teams, brands, and SEO agencies.
It’s essentially an influencer outreach and link-building platform, which allows you to find link-building opportunities, bloggers, and influencers really quickly.
You can also improve response rates with personalised outreach emails and follow-ups, and use advanced SEO integrations and outreach analytics to make data-driven decisions. It’s all quite clever, really.
If you have questions about any of this, or you want to talk to us about setting up, optimising or changing your SEO strategy, just get in touch. We’re always happy to hear from you and always happy to help.
