10 SEO Experts on Tools That They Can’t Live Without in 2022

Ahrefs

It’s not going to be a surprise that Ahrefs made this list. A lot of SEO professionals use this tool every day and can’t imagine working without it. But to not be baseless, this is what we heard about it from SEO experts.

Ahrefs is an excellent tool that we use to find backlinks and record the domain rating for them to better hone our SEO strategy. The tool makes it easy by allowing you to filter by the most recent links that are ‘do follow’ links. This matters because journalists do not always remember to reach out when an article that includes your backlink is published. Knowing this helps us understand where we stand in search engine results so that we can act to improve our ranking.

 

Lisa Odenweller
Founder & CEO of Kroma Wellness

I would not be able to work on SEO without Ahrefs. Using the tool changed the vision of the company in terms of global vision. Keyword research started to be a pilar for both PPC and SEO strategies, and it has become the 360º tool for our expansion and optimization.

 

Salva Jovells
Marketing Manager at Hockerty.com

SEMRush

SEMRush is a very popular tool among SEO experts. It is used for improving online visibility and gathering marketing insights. It has a keyword research option and provides search volume and CPC.

SEMRush is similar to Ahrefs but I think it’s good to use more than one SEO tool so there’s not just one source of truth. I use this page specifically to help analyze on-page ranking factors, what I can learn from the top 10 competition, and apply to our own blog posts.

Adam Rogers
Senior Content Marketing Manager at Shopify

 

SurferSEO

Another tool used by SEO experts is Surfer SEO – a content optimization tool that helps with planning and creating content. It also has a keyword research option and allows to optimize content to get the best results possible.

SurferSEO is our go-to content optimization and NLP analysis tool. It presents more data than any other content optimization tool we’ve seen and has several nifty features such as a content brief and SERP analysis tool. We use SurferSEO every time we want to optimize an article or right before an article gets published.

 

Mason Yu
Senior SEO Specialist at ClickUp

Google Analytics

We don’t think it’s necessary to underline how important analyzing your SEO process and activities is. You really shouldn’t be shooting blinds when it comes to SEO, because it can cost you your rankings According to experienced SEO specialists Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the best for this job.

Google Analytics is a useful business analytics tool that gives statistics to help you know how you measure up & how to improve. It furnishes small businesses with helpful business insights.

As a small business, you should know your target audience/customers and laser focus on them to maximize business growth & profits. You can get internal data from analytics to help streamline your efforts for intentional target marketing. It is especially effective for small businesses looking to scale up organically.

 

Lily Ugbaja
SEO Specialist & Founder of Dollar Creed

Screaming Frog

No SEO process is complete without a full website audit. As you can probably guess there’s a hand full of tools that can be helpful with this task. But which one should you choose? Apparently, Screaming Frog is a go-to SEO site audit tool that experts recommend.

Screaming Frog is a versatile application. It allows you to easily do a technical audit of your website’s SEO. After downloading the tool, enter your domain name and click “Crawl All SubDomains.” You may access the full audit information of all web pages in seconds. No need to manually audit every single page of your website to discover errors in status codes and meta tags.

All of these features make this one of the top SEO tools for small businesses. The quantity of internal and external links on each page is also a factor. You can look up click depth, canonical link information, and meta-refresh directives.

 

Adam Fard
Founder & Head of Design at Adam Fard’ UX Agency

UberSuggest

Another keyword research tool recommended by SEO specialists is UberSuggest. It provides a lot of useful data about keywords such as search volume and intent, cost per click, and keyword difficulty.

The ebb and flow of keywords and phrases that spin their way through the internet are not always easy to keep track of, so I heavily rely on UberSuggest as my key SEO tool. Algorithms, phrases, and even search intent can be misread or not updated in a timely fashion, which can cause businesses that are reliant on content-rich websites and promotions in the dark, leading to missed opportunities.

UberSuggest is a free SEO tool that quickly identifies keywords, and the context of their searches, and then uses SERPs to rate them. Its ability to view their use in both short and long phrases, and place them in metrics such as volume, competition, or even seasonal categories, provides our business the latest information to keep our content relevant and our SEO rating high.

 

Woody Sears
Founder of HearHere

Yoast SEO

The most popular WordPress plugin – Yoast SEO is well knowing in the SEO industry. It makes optimizing your content much easier and suggests improvements that can really boost your content.

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin makes it so easy to optimize our site for SEO and flags potential issues. We can easily check that our blog posts have a clear SEO strategy and are optimized. The copywriting tips are specifically helpful to the entire team – it makes all of our writers cognizant of search terms in their content. Overall it makes on-site SEO easy to implement.

 

Krista Neher
CEO of Boot Camp Digital

SERanking

Tracking your keywords ranking is an essential part of the SEO process. Otherwise, how would you know if you’re doing a good job with your positioning? Doing it manually is a nightmare, especially if you have a lot of keywords to track. So according to SEO specialists, SERanking is here to help.

SERanking is our rank tracking tool of choice. Its unique features is that it can show average  weekly and monthly ranks per keyword, and also has the ability to show the history of a SERP. So if we’re going in depth researching a specific keyword, we can discover what brands were previously ranking and in what positions. That will allow us to determine how volatile a SERP is and allow us to identify newcomer articles are being favored.

 

Mason Yu
Senior SEO Specialist at ClickUp

Clearscope

Another content optimization tool that’s worth your consideration is Clearscope. It also helps with keyword research and overall content optimization, so you can create the best content possible. According to SEO experts, it’s a very useful tool to have in your toolbox.

I’ve tried out quite a few SEO tools in recent years but there were very few that impressed me as much as Clearscope. This AI-based tool does something really cool – you type in your keyword and it will show you stats for the top-performing content for this word. The length, keyword density, reading level, etc.

What’s even better, you can copy and paste your own content into Clearscope for this keyword and it will give you suggestions for how to improve your piece of content. It will also show you which secondary keywords you need to hit too in order to rank.

The best part is – it works! When you create a piece of content and use Clearscope for guidance, it usually takes 3 weeks for the piece of content to start ranking. This is absolutely amazing and I’ve never seen any other tool that can give you guidance like this.

 

Sharon van Donkelaar
CMO & Head of Growth at Expandi

Clearscope gives me a quick glance at SERP’s top 10 and its terms map from across those pages allows me to help decode search intent quickly. The tool itself can help me include content ideas or subheading ideas I’d never have thought of.

 

Adam Rogers
Senior Content Marketing Manager at Shopify

Schema Markup Validator

Schema Markup Validator is used to validate all structured data that’s embedded in web pages. According to SEO experts, it’s crucial to take care of the trust and authority of a website, and this tool makes it much easier.

Schema.org has a free structured data testing tool on their site called the Schema Markup Validator. Webmasters can use this tool to double-check structured data submissions and test for markup errors prior to publishing the data live to their site.

As Google continues to prioritize trust and authority for health content, it’s important for site owners to be submitting relevant structured data with every webpage they publish, and this free tool should be an essential part of the process.

 

Calloway Cook
President of Illuminate Labs

Google Data Studio

GDS is a tool used for converting data into customizable reports and dashboards. We used it ourselves at Delante for making monthly reports for our clients. It allows you to create visual reports and connect directly to your data gathering program, so you don’t have to put the data manually.

Google Data Studio can pull in data from many types of sources and create numerous visualizations. This is extremely important for reporting and stakeholder purposes. We have biweekly presentations where we present on blended data between Google Search Console, Google Analytics, our rank tracking tool (SERanking), and product conversion data.

 

Mason Yu
Senior SEO Specialist at ClickUp

Spyfu

Competition analysis is a base for a good SEO. You want to know what is your competition doing in order to excel them. Obviously, there are some useful tools you can use for it, and one recommended by experts is Spyfu.

When it comes to research and tracking competitors, Spyfu if a powerful tool. We can see our competitor’s strategies for both paid and organic. We can also look for opportunities based on competition. This gives us external focus in our strategy, vs. internal focus.

 

Krista Neher
CEO of Boot Camp Digital

The SEO tool market is full of different options to choose from. Sometimes it might be really difficult to make a choice and the variety can give you a headache. We hope that this listing with professional advice from SEO experts will help you make the best decision for your business.

If you use any other tools and you would like to share your opinion about them, feel free to leave a comment! And if you would like to know how it is to work on SEO with professionals, contact us!