My Favourite
SEO Tools
Using the right tools for the job is important to help you make data-driven and inspirational decisions that work for your clients and their audience. These are my recommended SEO tools.
01
Website Auditing
SEO audits diagnose your website’s search engine visibility to optimize ranking and organic traffic.
Every good strategy begins with an audit. Find out how the website stacks up against its competitors, where its pitfalls are, and whether anything would inhibit its growth if left unresolved.
Site Crawler
Sitebulb crawls your website and displays its findings with clear visuals and insights that make it easier to unearth issues.
Site Crawler
Screaming Frog is a site crawling powerhouse that leaves no stone unturned. It is great for technical SEO audits and allows thorough analysis.
Chrome Extension
With a user-agent switcher, you can pretend to be browsing from a different device or browser, and can view websites as Googlebot, BingBot, etc.
Chrome Extension
This plugin adds various web developer tools to your web browser such as disabling Javascript/CSS/Cookie, autocompleting forms, etc.
Chrome Extension
Redirect Path flags up HTTP Status Codes as well as client side redirects like Meta and Javascript redirects, bringing potential issues to your attention.
Chrome Extension
Robots Exclusion Checker indicates whether any robots exclusions are preventing your page from being crawled or indexed by search engines.
02
Technical Optimisation
Technical SEO builds a strong foundation for your website by ensuring search engines can easily crawl, understand, and rank your content.
Technical implementation used to be time consuming and often difficult. While this is still the case for advanced techniques, a lot of the basics are now easy to roll out at scale with various tools and plugins.
WordPress Plugin
Rank Math is my favourite SEO plugin for WordPress. It offers a lot of functionality and goes beyond what you’d expect from a plugin.
WordPress Plugin
Yoast have made a great plugin tat adds all of the basic SEO requirements that don’t come with WordPress out of the box in an easy to manage interface.
Code Editor
VSCode is a free, open-source code editor from Microsoft. It supports many programming languages and is a staple in my toolkit.
03
Keyword Research
Keyword and search intent research unlock the secrets of what users are looking for online, allowing you to tailor your content for optimal SEO impact.
Keyword research might be an old term by now. What we really need to do is think about user questions and topic research. What does the user want and how do they search for it? These are some of the best tools out there.
Search Demand Research
Voxel is an amazing tool that allows you to collect keyword and demand data, and visualise it in various ways to help communicate organic potential.
Keyword Research
Dragon Metrics is my favourite keyword research and tracking tool. They have the most customisable SEO reporting tool I’ve ever seen.
Keyword Research
SE Ranking is great for finding inspiration, and offers a lot of functionality for vert reasonable prices. You simply can’t go wrong with this one.
Keyword Research
It’s a staple in almost every SEO’s toolkit, and for good reason. It integrates with a lot of tools that I use on a daily basis, increasing their value tremendously.
Keyword Clustering
Keywords don’t actually mean much anymore these days if they’re not used in the right context and topic cluster. This is exactly the insight KI offers.
Topic Analysis
WikiGraph visually shows the relation between different topics according to Wikipedia. It’s a great inspirational tool for topic research.
04
Information Gain
It’s important to create unique and valuable content compared to what already exists on the web.
A good content briefing tool helps you analyse your competitors’ web pages so you can add a unique spin to your content while still reiterating the most important topics they cover.
Content Briefing
Keyword Insights isn’t just useful for research. It boasts a powerful SERP analysis and content briefing tool that delivers fantastic scalable results.
Content Briefing
Inlinks is another useful tool for content briefing. Instead of using keywords, it focuses on topics and context. It can be a great tool to produce content at scale.
Content Briefing
Before writing anything, it’s very helpful to know what people asked Google in relation to the topic you are writing about. This is just the tool for it.
05
Building Links
Internal links navigate users within your site, while inbound links (from other sites) boost SEO like endorsements.
Creating topically relevant links to create meaningful links between pages can be tricky business. This becomes a lot easier with the tools listed below. Also building inbound links through sponsored articles or digital PR is important for your website’s rankings – if done the right way.
Internal Link Builder
Inlinks automatically finds internal link opportunities based on topical relations between content while using schema to substantiate links even further.
WordPress Plugin
A very cost-effective method to manage internal links on WordPress websites. Simply provide a keyword for each URL and it will find link opportunities for you.
Sponsored Article Campaigns
Rocketlinks is a sponsored article campaign platform where you can manage your own or run managed-for-you link building campaigns.