It goes without saying that a carpenter is only as good as his tools, I would argue that in many ways the same can be said of search engine optimizers. Every trade has its tools, and search engine marketing (SEM) is no different.
Part of doing successful keyword and competitor research is allocating time aside every month to analyze what’s working, and modify your content and link strategies accordingly.
In order to know which keywords to target, it's essential to understand the demand for a given term or phrase but the process can be challenging and time-consuming.
There are search engine marketing (SEM Guide to SEO and PPC Traffic) tools that take care of the difficult parts and allow teams to focus on strategy. Tools like SEMrush and Google's AdWords Keyword Planner are a common starting point for SEO keyword research because they suggest keywords and provides estimated search volume.
Most SEM tools work differently and they have specific role to perform. Even if you hire an agency like Create the Bridge to manage your SEM campaign, it is important that you familiarize yourself with the best SEM tools available.
Analysis tools:
Basically, by building external links to your website, you are trying to gather as many ‘votes’ as you can so that you can bypass your competitors and rank higher. When thinking about link-building, don’t take the easy way, but try to get links from hard-to-get places. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has.
SEMrush
This tool is second to none for discovering the organic positions of a site that you don’t have analytics access for. SEMrush is a powerful, free (and paid) keyword research tool, and is one of the tools I use most on a daily basis, especially when it comes to competitive research. SEM is one of the most essential search engine marketing tool, that I believe every serious blogger and internet marketer should have in their SEO tool arsenal.
Skill Level: Intermediate to Expert
Ahrefs.com
A back-link reporting tool. Ahrefs.com is one of those SEO tools, which are multi-purpose and could work as a complete SEO suite for you. After you enter a link, Ahrefs.com gives you a wealth of information regarding the link. Ahrefs.com’s site SEO report will let you fix many issues on your site, and you get the following details:
Meta title
Duplicate Title
Missing meta description
Response code of pages
Slow pages
Pages with lot of external and internal links
Long URL’s
Skill Level: Intermediate
Link Prospecting/Acquisition tools:
BuzzStream
BuzzStream is the only email outreach and link prospecting tool that you’ll ever need. If you’re serious about SEO, then this has to be in your toolset. Through BuzzStream’s interface, you can search for new link prospects, extract contact information, and send emails directly (from your own email accounts) through BuzzStream’s interface.
Skill Level: Intermediate
Content Marketing Research tools:
It is important to create and improve content, and to match or better content on competitors’ websites. Always think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Stay organized around that topic and regularly create fresh, unique content. Awesome, new content (such as a frequently updated blog) will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors.
Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is one of my favorite tools out there at the moment. You can create alerts for any topic, brand or keyword, filter through content relevant to your niche, and sort it by the number of social shares across each social network.
BuzzSumo also provides a powerful content alerts feature to keep you on top of new and trending content and allows you to set up alerts for keywords, authors and domains, including competitor sites.The alert can notify you whenever a keyword or brand is mentioned in articles or content on the web. You can also get an alert as soon as your competitor published new content or any site you want to monitor.
BuzzSumo has to be the most important tool that I use for my content marketing and SEO campaigns.
Skill Level: Intermediate
Google Adwords: Keyword Planner
Adwords had to be included, though everyone reading this is likely already familiar with it. Keyword Planner is, for those who don’t know, Google’s AdWords tools to provide search volume estimates and keyword ideas. It is a free AdWords tool that helps you estimate how keyword ideas may perform.
Essentially, this is the tool for keyword research and I love it for finding content ideas.
Skill Level: Beginner
Performance Measurement:
Google Analytics
Plain and simple, this is the industry’s leading web analytics platform. Google Analytics can provide a wealth of information about your website's usage and traffic. It is a very useful tool for tracking site statistics and I’m sure most of you have heard of it by now. When you want to know what your traffic is doing and where it’s going on your site, Analytics is the tool for the job.
Google Analytics makes it easy for anyone managing a site to track and analyze this data. It's a powerful, free tool that can answer a variety of questions for a wide range of users such as: site visits, page views, bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit and percentage of new visits.
Skill Level: Intermediate to Expert
We hope that our brief description of the most efficient SEM software inspired you to start using it immediately and move forward with your business. Search engine marketing is not as difficult as it seems, especially if you have this arsenal of tools at your disposal. Because, after all, the only way to be certain of anything in marketing is to rigorously test.