One of the most difficult things to buy on the Internet is SEO. The two main reasons for this are that there are so many different options to choose from, and because the whole practice of SEO is steeped in mystery. But there is a solution to help you choose an SEO tool for your business that will deliver results and give you a return on your investment—use one that professional freelance marketers use.
Doing this means you can cut down on all the research, trial periods, and researching, because you know that other people have already done that for you. Many of those people actually know what they are doing too. So, here are the top rated SEO tools by freelancer marketers.
1. Moz
Moz offers a range of both free and premium SEO tools. The free tools include:
· Open Site Explorer - To identify link building opportunities, primarily through investigating other sites in your industry
· Followerwonk - To help you improve your Twitter following
· MozBar - An app for Google Chrome and Firefox that lets you analyze links and keywords on websites
· Moz Local - Helps you to check your local search engine listings and make improvements
· MozCast - To keep an eye on Google rankings
Moz offers premium features and a full suite of tools that can help you research keywords, analyze your competitors, build links, and more.
2. Raven Tools
Raven Tools provide a range of SEO tools to help you improve the visibility of your site on search engines. This includes keyword research that pulls its data from a range of sources so that you get more meaningful results. It also offers some link building tools, as well as tools to analyze the websites of your competitors. It has a partnership with an article writing service as well that you can use to create new content for your website or blog.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is particularly powerful at informing you of the keywords on your site that are ranking in Google. You can also analyze competitor sites to get a better understanding of their use of keywords, and how they are ranking in Google. You can also use other tools in the suite to find other keywords that you should be targeting.
4. Ahrefs
If you want to analyze the link profile or your website, Ahrefs is one of the best tools available. It is also good at analyzing the links of your competitors’ websites. It can tell you what type of link it is and where it comes from. For example, it can tell you whether the link is dofollow or not, plus it organizes the data so you can quickly and easily see the different types of website that are linking back to yours, as well as those on your competitor's. You can see if the links are edu or gov links, and much more.
5. gShift
gShift offers a range of tools to help you with your SEO strategy. One of its most powerful features is the ability to break down its results geographically. This means you can analyze a website's performance locally, on a city-wide basis, or nationally. For small businesses and local traders, this is useful because you can see how your website is performing in your target market, and you can analyze bigger competitors and break down the results to your geographical area.
All of the tools on this list have a learning curve, but the more you use them the better you will become. Additionally, your website should also start to get better search rankings once you learn how to use them properly.