For those who want every advantage in their SEO campaigns there are many professional SEO tools available for every conceivable task. From sitemap generation to data crunching, there are seemingly endless options to assist you. Every SEO has their own preference. Following is a list of tools preferred by my SEO agency.
Link Profile Analysis
Ahrefs
The largest and the freshest index of live links. We’ve done many extensive tests internally comparing Ahrefs with Majestic SEO and have found Ahrefs to provide the most link data.
Majestic SEO
Link intelligence tools for SEO and Internet PR and Marketing. Majestic is the most used link profile analysis tool in the SEO industry.
Open Site Explorer
http://moz.com/researchtools/ose
Open Site Explorer is Moz’s Search Engine for Links. Although their data is comprehensive, it seems to have the smallest database of live links among the top three link analysis tools.
Ranking Analysis
SEMRush
SEMRush is like accessing the Google Analytics accounts of any website, your own or a competitor’s. It shows you all of the keywords a website ranks for, both organic and AdWords.
Keyword & Competition Research
Market Samurai
Market Samurai is a full-featured keyword and competition research tool that allows you to research and compare large lists of keywords and competitors ranking in the top ten.
Google Keyword Planner
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Google’s keyword tool requires you to have an AdWords account to use, although you do not need to fund your account or actually run ads.
Keyword Elite
This tool doesn’t necessarily do anything that Market Samurai or Google’s own keyword planner can’t, but it makes the list simply for its unparalleled ability to handle very large lists of keywords. If you plan to process large lists this is the keyword tool you’ll need.
Technical Audits
Screaming Frog
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program you can install locally on your PC, Mac or Linux machine which spiders websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key onsite elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting into Excel. You can view, analyse and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.
Google Page Speed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This tool allows you to analyze the page loading speed of any website and will also explain exactly what will be needed to improve speed.
Global Speed Test
This tool loads any website URL from multiple locations around the world and reports how long it took each location to load the website.
SEO Browser
Browse SEO is a web app that allows you to view any webpage without distractions caused by styles. It also highlights parts of a page that are relevant for SEO.
Sitemap Generation
XML Sitemaps
This tool offers a standalone PHP script that you can install on your server. It crawls your site, generates sitemaps and even keeps them updated whenever you add or remove pages. Plus it has a lot of filtering tools to make sure your sitemaps only contain the URLs you want.
Data Harvesting
Scrapebox
Scrapebox has a bad reputation due to its long history as a blog comment spamming tool. But it’s useful for so many other things that are completely white hat. It basically automates many of the routine tasks common to SEO that would otherwise require hours of tedious work. It’s an efficient time saver.
Netpeak Checker
http://netpeak.us/soft/netpeak-checker/
Netpeak Checker is a good alternative to Scrapebox. It is not as full-featured, but does a great job overall with the added benefit of being free.
Monitoring & Reporting
Advanced Web Ranking
http://www.advancedwebranking.com/
This tool has two versions, a desktop and a cloud version. The desktop version allows you to monitor the performance of an unlimited number of sites for an unlimited number of keywords. The cloud version limits you in volume but has the benefit of being cloud-based.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Visual Website Optimizer
This is great and very easy to use conversion rate optimization tool. It allows you to run many A/B test variations through a simple online interface. The only way to truly know what website variations and changes perform best is to simultaneously test them side by side, which VWO makes very easy to do.