7 Best #SEO & Traffic Monitoring Tools

NicholasBodell
ART + marketing
Published in
5 min readOct 12, 2016

Welcome to part 2 of my tools posts at Medium. In case you are interested, first one was about content marketing tools I use daily.

OK. So, last time we met I was nothing but the learner ;-) not that I am a master now but I do have few more tricks/tools up my sleeve I’d like to share with you. In the lights of the latest Penguin 4.0 Goggle search update (link is a must read for SEO freaks) I thought it would be best to focus on SEO and traffic monitoring tools this time.

Believe it or not, search engines still are the biggest and the best source for traffic. And still no.1 priority for most marketeers when planning and executing digital strategies. Now, I’m sure you have far better tools in your bookmarks (share it please, contact me or comment this post) but with these I actually work and they help me effectively promote my business and keep an eye on what my competitors are doing.

Google PageSpeed Insights

A straightforward free tool for checking site speed and usability, testing loading time and performance for desktop and mobile. Why is it important? If you have to ask chances are you’re not into SEO but….it’s just one of around 200 known ranking factors and with Google AMP Project getting strong support from web community it looks like it’s going to be one of the most important ranking factors you need to take care of asap.

Google Analytics

You won’t go far with any online business, unless you make use of Google Analytic, which, at the moment, is one of the best ways to keep an eye on your traffic (page views, impressions, tracking visitors, demographics, bounce rate, social sharing etc.). Everything you need to know about your visitors is there.

MuStat

In search for partners and publishers that are a good match to BridTV, MuStat.com is the one I turn to. It is a free website analysis tool that allows you to know just how popular and how many visitors, site you are interested, gets per day/month. It’s not as good as SimilarWeb but when you need a quick check on who’s contacting you, or is the place you are looking at worth of your time, this is the place to use.

SERPs Rank Checker

Want to know how your site ranks for certain keywords? Use SERPs Rank Checker. Just add keywords you are interested in and your site URL and click for results. It’s another great free tool when you need to act fast.
Pricing: free and pro starts at $197

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler which allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO. If you need to find broken links, errors & redirects, analyze page titles and meta data of your website go for free option. If you aim at managing multiple URL’s and get something extra go for paid option.
Pricing: free and paid $200 per year

SEO Quake for Chrome

If I’d have to choose one SEO tool to use for the rest of my life, SEOQuake would be it. It’s a Chrome browser extension from SEMrush connected to SEMrush tools and even in their free version you’ll have access to general website overview info, backlinks, used anchors, referring domains and referring IPs with their authority, your indexed pages, comparison results etc. Everything is covered. However, keep in mind free account comes with limitations ie just one project/URL and around 20–30 results for each data so go for pro version from day one, you won’t regret it.
Pricing: free and pro starts at $69.95

aHrefs

Site Explorer, positions tracker and explorer, content explorer, crawl report and backlinks checker… all that and a bit more is what aHrefs is. I use it to track my backlinks and keywords but also to check and compare what my competition is doing. What separates it from other tools here mentioned is great, insightful and full of tips/tricks blog. Not only do they show you how to work with their tool but they also supply you with genuine case studies done through aHref with wealth of information you can use and apply to your business.
Pricing: 7day $7 trial and then from $99 monthly for lite version

Read on…links :-)

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE

These are my favorites but don’t just take my word for them. Check other sources like the ones listed here for second, third opinion (have a resource in mind? hit me up, let me know):
Top 4 Most Popular SEO Tools: How Do They Get Traffic?
SEO Tools: The Complete List (2016 Update)
11 SEO Tools for Small Business
Webmaster SEO Tools

Now, Over to you!

Alright! Much of what you read here is based entirely on my own needs. These are #SEO tools I use everyday in my efforts to spread the good word about what I/we at BRIDTV video platform do (see what i did there!?). ​

This is the second post in my 4 post series about tools we use. The rest are:
1. Content Marketing Tools
2. SEO & Traffic Monitoring Tools
3. Social Media Marketing Tools
4. Conversion & Lead Generation Tools

Or if you can’t wait for the followups visit the original post from BridTV blog titled:
20 Great Tools For Your Everyday Content Marketing Efforts
with somewhat less personal perspective on tools we use.

Now really over to you … first of all if you like what you have read here please LIKE IT and SHARE IT and FOLLOW me :-) Also, I’d love for you to hit me with your thoughts on these SEO tools or introduce me to new ones. Show me what’s working for you? Leave a comment in the comment section below! and THX for reading!

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NicholasBodell
ART + marketing

A dad, extreme sports wannabe, a geek looking to leave his mark on the volatile and exciting online video scene with http://www.brid.tv