Seven Awesome SEO Tools – A Webmaster's Most Important Tools
In this post, I’ll open up my own toolbox to give you a glimpse into some of the tools I use more or less every single day.
However, I focus exclusively on tools that can be used across different CMS platforms—so no Yoast, WP Rocket, Shopify apps, or other CMS-specific solutions in this post.
What all these tools have in common is that they require practice to master. That’s why this post will serve as a general overview of the tools and their benefits and advantages—since I could write seven skyscrapers’ worth of text about each of the seven tools if I were to really go into depth.
If you'd like more in-depth and specific tips than I have space to provide in this post, please email me at ak@amplify.dk.
Good tools make the job half as hard
A chef doesn’t cook with a dull knife. A painter doesn’t paint with old, cheap paint. And a carpenter doesn’t work with a blunt chisel. But the chef, the painter, and the carpenter all know that neither the knife, the paint, nor the chisel can do the job on their own. It takes an arsenal of tools if they are to deliver a solid piece of work. Good tools are half the battle.
The same applies to webmasters who aspire to top rankings on Google—you can’tdo search engine optimizationwithout the right tools. But one good tool isn’t enough either. Your toolbox needs to be filled to the brim with tools that each serve their own purpose and, at the same time, complement one another.
So, without further ado: Let's open the toolbox and take a look at what's inside.
1) Ahrefs – The SEO Consultant's Comprehensive All-in-One Tool
Ahrefsis always at the top of my toolbox when I take on an SEO project. That’s not to say it’s only useful in the initial phase of your SEO strategy. It’s also perfectly suited for ongoing monitoring and optimization—it’s not for nothing that I call it the SEO consultant’s all-encompassing, all-in-one tool.
But the reason I still keep this program at the top of my toolbox is that I see it as an indispensable tool for building a data foundation. This is due in no small part to Ahrefs’ “content gap” feature. It allows you to compare your own visibility for relevant keywords with that of comparable competitors.
By entering competitors’ domains, specific paths, or URLs and comparing them to your own, you’ll get a list of keywords that your competitors rank for—but your website doesn’t. This makes the content gap feature an excellent tool forkeyword analysis, as it helps you discover new keywords that can increase your visibility among your target audience.
Example:
In the example below, I’ve compared a dental clinic’s website with three competitors using Ahrefs’ content gap feature.
Here, for example, I can see that all three competitors appear in search results for “teeth whitening,” and I also get data on the estimated monthly search volume (5,000) and keyword difficulty (3) for that keyword. That way, I already know that:
- The clinic's website should have a page about teeth whitening (provided, of course, that it offers this service).
- There is a significant amount of potential monthly traffic to be gained by ranking high for this keyword.
- I don't need to invest a lot of time and energy in link building for the site—a keyword difficulty of 3 means that Ahrefs estimates I only need backlinks from about 4 other websites to rank in the top 10.
I can also do this exercise with other relevant keywords from the list. After that, I can dig deeper into my competitors using Ahrefs. For example, I can use Ahrefs’ link-building tool “Referring Domains” to see which websites my competitors have backlinks from.
Finally, in the “Overview” section, I can get additional data about a given keyword—for example, I get a list of common questions about teeth whitening as well as suggestions for alternative keywords.
That way, I get data-driven guidance on how to structure the content on my landing page, because I now know which questions and subtopics people are searching for on Google. This increases my chances of ranking highly.
I usually organize and categorize my keywords in a spreadsheet afterward, because that gives me an overview of the keywords within the same category and helps me prioritize them. This ensures that I don’t just write landing pages based on keywords—but also focus on matching users’ search intent.
Overall, Ahrefs offers a wide range of features that make it easier to perform both on-page and off-page SEO. In addition, you can use it to track keyword performance (Rank Tracker) and identify technical issues (Site Audit).
I highly recommend that you explore the Ahrefs Academy if you want to dive deep into the countless possibilities and features of this comprehensive all-in-one tool.
2) Screaming Frog – instant insight into technical pitfalls
Don't let the silly name fool you—Screaming Frog is indispensable for the technical SEO consultant. It's also my go-to tool when I need to identify technical issues on a website.
In fact, I always crawl a website in Screaming Frog as one of the first things I do when I need to identify technical SEO pitfalls for a new client. Screaming Frog reveals a lot of parameters that I would otherwise have to sift through thousands of lines of code to find.
With Screaming Frog, you can, among other things:
- Find missing and duplicate h-tags
- Find missing and duplicate meta tags
- Get an overview of images larger than 100 KB
- Check whether the meta tags are the correct length
- Get an overview of your image sizes and alt text
- find broken links (404 pages)
- Analyze redirects during a site migration
- Retrieve data from Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, PageSpeed Insights, and other SEO tools via API
- Find directives that prevent your page from being crawled correctly
- Get an overview of your internal link profile and outbound links
- Crawl your site the way Google would
- and much, much more….
In short, Screaming Frog gives you insight into all the technical challenges that can prevent your website from performing well in Google’s organic search results. And then all you have to do is start optimizing based on the information Screaming Frog serves up to you on a silver platter. .
You can read much more about how to do this in Webamp's seven tips for improving your SEO using Screaming Frog.
You can download the program for free here —on this page, you can also purchase a license for Screaming Frog. However, this isn’t necessary in most cases, since the free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, which is primarily relevant for larger online stores with many web addresses.
3) PageSpeed Insights – Essential Insights into Your Website's Speed
Many SEO specialists have been tearing their hair out ever since Google made speed a ranking factor with itsCore Web Vitalsalgorithm update in 2020.
With that infamous algorithm update, website speed suddenly began to have a direct impact on SEO. As a result, website speed was no longer just a matter of user patience, but also of a website’s ranking in Google’s search results.
I’ve seen many online discussions about whether speed optimization is the responsibilityof SEO specialistsor developers. While it’s true that, in many cases, developers have the skills to optimize speed, it’s also the responsibility of SEO specialists to identify speed-related pitfalls—precisely because a website’s speed is so critical to SEO.
And this is wherePageSpeed Insightsis indispensable. PageSpeed Insights provides insights into specific speed-related pitfalls on both computers and mobile devices.
By entering your URL into the tool, you’ll get an overview of your website’s ability to meet the Core Web Vitals metrics—and, most importantly, whether or not it passes the Core Web Vitals test. Finally, you’ll also receive suggestions for improvements that can help it pass—and thus perform better in terms of Google’s requirements for user experience and load time.
Who is ultimately responsible for addressing the issues identified by PageSpeed Insights is an entirely different discussion. In Webamp’s SEO department, we handle speed optimization ourselves—partly because we believe developers’ skills are better utilized elsewhere, but also because, as SEO specialists, we feel responsible for solving our clients’ SEO challenges without compromise.
4) Google Search Console – Google’s goldmine of a webmaster tool
Google Search Console—formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools—is Google's own goldmine of SERP and technical SEO data.
Here, you’ll find essential data on how Google users interact with your website in search engine results. In addition, Search Console can provide you with information about any user-related and technical issues on your website—including page experience, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and other technical parameters that impact the user experience and, consequently, your SEO.
Finally, Search Console gives you an overview of your website’s coverage—for example, are there any invalid URLs, 404 pages, or pages that haven’t been indexed by Google and therefore don’t appear in search results?
In other words, Search Console is an absolutely essential tool in a webmaster’s toolkit because it provides you with concrete, data-driven suggestions for improvements.
For me personally, Search Console is probably the tool I use most frequently. This is largely because the platform gives me insights into optimization opportunities for alternative keywords. I find this information in the “Performance” tab, where you can see how your subpages are performing in Google’s search results based on the following criteria:
- total number of clicks
- total number of exposures
- average CTR
- average position
The figures are based on actual user activity on Google, so you won’t find any “purer” data on how successful your SEO strategy is. For example, you’ll learn how many times your subpages have been displayed for a given keyword during a specific time period.
In addition, you can also filter by country and device to gain insight into your SEO performance across different countries and devices—for example, are you lagging behind in some of your geographic markets, or do you perform worse on mobile than on desktop?
And this is where Search Console really shines compared to, for example, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and similar platforms. While Ahrefs and others work with estimated monthly search volume, in GSC you can actually see the actual search volume for a given period.
This gives you a much more data-driven basis for assessing whether it makes sense to be visible for a given keyword—and, if necessary, optimizing your landing page accordingly.
For example, does it make sense to update a landing page because it has been displayed enough times for search terms other than those you originally intended when you wrote it?
Example:
Let’s take an example from a masonry company’s landing page about home additions. Over a given period, the page has been viewed 50,962 times for the search term “home addition,” which has also been the top priority. In addition, the page appears for a number of related search terms.
And with a spot among the top 10 results on Google for that keyword, the site has also received a respectable number of clicks from various searches.
But GSC tells me that the page has also been displayed 3,846 times for the search term “detached house addition”—a keyword we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the page’s content, but for which the page still appears in Google’s search results. However, with an average Google ranking of No. 42 for this search term, the click-through rate is, unsurprisingly, quite low.
In other words, the masonry company has missed out on a significant number of potential clicks during this period by not optimizing the page for this keyword. So now it’s just a matter of optimizing our content to rank higher for this keyword.
5) Google Analytics – Google’s data MONSTER
While Search Console provides you with technical data and statistics on how your users interact with your website in search results,Google Analyticsgives you insights into your users’ behavior after they’ve clicked through to your website—and it’s an almost inexhaustible source of valuable data once you’ve learned to navigate its many features.
You can use that data to optimize content, navigation, conversion, and much more on your website.
By the way, Google Analytics isn’t just an SEO tool. Anyone who works in online marketing and sales or runs an online store or website can benefit from Analytics—whether you’re involved insearch engine marketing,social media marketing, or are a business owner looking to generate leads through your website.
Analytics has many layers that run deep, and you can quickly get lost in a tangled web of filtering options once you start scratching the surface of the data. But this is also where Analytics truly shines. There are virtually no limits to what you can uncover about your users’ behavior on your website.
I might as well just say it right away. Analytics is a MONSTER that, upon closer inspection, can seem impossible to rein in and tame. And it doesn’t make things any easier that Google is currently phasing out the current Analytics Universal in favor of GA4, which differs significantly from Universal in many ways.
That’s why I won’t go into further detail about Analytics in this post—partly because both Universal and GA4 are far too extensive, and partly because it’s currently possible to use both Universal and GA4. And the two platforms are so different that trying to understand them both at once would be like learning Danish and Afrikaans at the same time.
That's why I highly recommend that you visitGoogle's Skillshop if you want to learn how to use Analytics.
6) Schema Markup Generator – Structured Data for Dummies
Structured data is a method for technically optimizing your content so that search engines can better understand it. You can read much more about this in Webamp'sintroduction to structured data.
Structured data can, however, be a bit of a headache if you don't know how to write JSON-LD, which is the markup language Google recommends for writing structured data.
I’m certainly no code whiz either, which is whythe Schema Markup Generatoris my go-to tool when I need to create schema markups. The Schema Markup Generator speaks JSON-LD fluently. All it needs is input from you, and it’ll return error-free schema markup (Schema.orgis the universal vocabulary for structured data). This little tool makes it possible for anyone to generate their own schema markup.
Afterward, it’s a good idea to test your code snippet in Google’sRich Results Test toolto ensure there are no errors in your code—because while the Schema Markup Generator ensures error-free output, it also requires that you provide the tool with the correct input.
You can then copy and paste the code into your website—either directly into the source code or via Tag Manager. I’m a big fan of the latter myself, since it lets me keep all my structured data in one place and saves me from having to search through my website’s backend if I need to edit or delete schema markup.
Below, I have used Schema Markup to create an FAQ markup for Webamp’s subpage ononline marketing. On the left, I have included my questions and answers, and on the right, Schema Markup has generated an error-free script, which I subsequently tested and implemented on the subpage.
And the result? First, it’s now even easier for Google to understand that the page is about online marketing. Second, my short FAQ now appears in the search results, which means Webamp takes up more space in the search results, thereby increasing the chance of getting more clicks on the search result—in technical terms, we’re increasing our CTR.
Last but not least, it creates a better user experience because users can find answers to common questions about online marketing right on the results page. And a good user experience equals good SEO.
This is how my schema markup is interpreted by Google, which translates JSON-LD into easy-to-read human language, presented in a clear, expandable section.
7) Thruuu – an awesome SERP scraper for content creators
It wasn't actually me who gave Thruuu the label “awesome”—it was the developer himself. But Thruuu really is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Let me explain…
Good content is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. Because if you hit the mark with your target audience—and thus your users’ search intent—you’ll also be rewarded with better rankings on Google, since Google is always interested in delivering the most relevant results to its users. That’s why text, images, and other content on your website are the top priority once you’ve got your keyword analysis in place.
However, if your text and other content are to ensure that your website ranks higher for selected keywords, they must also be competitive. In other words, they must be on par with those of your competitors—in terms of information, angle, length, and structure.
However, it can be quite a grind to work your way through your competitors’ content to find a common thread in what gets a given landing page into the top 10 on Google—and that’s exactly where Thruuu comes into its own.
With Thruuu, you can gain insight into the content that’s performing well on Google’s results page with just a few clicks. This saves you from having to manually click through the landing pages you want to compete against for a given keyword.
Enter the keyword you want data on (and don’t forget to select the language, country, and any other desired parameters); and presto: Thruuu will give you an overview of your competitors’ metrics, which can help you create content that will take your landing page to the top—including:
- title tag and meta description
- average number of words on the pages in the search results
- number of words on each page of the search results
- h-tags on every page—in other words: angle and
- subheadings in the text
- number of images on each page
- Number of links on each page—both internal and outbound links
- Related searches and Google's Frequently Asked Questions
- Speed performance on the various landing pages
- Latest update to the various landing pages
- structured data
In addition, you can export your data to a spreadsheet, making it easier to get an overview and organize your content when you're ready to implement it on your landing page.
This way, you’ll gain an overview of the content and technical SEO aspects that ensure higher rankings. Most importantly, you’ll be able to better tailor your content to search intent, because you can see the main angle and sub-angles within a given search query. This makes it easier for you to produce content that focuses on topics rather than keywords—also known assemantic SEO.
For example, here I entered “teeth whitening” and scraped the search results for data related to this search.
After that, I can take a closer look at the individual landing pages—starting with the landing page that ranks first in the organic search results.
That way, I can look over my competitor's shoulder and figure out exactly why this particular landing page is performing so well in search results.
FAQ About SEO Software
What are SEO tools?
SEO tools are software that ensure your SEO strategy is 100% data-driven and strategically targeted—from the initial keyword analysis to ongoing monitoring and optimization.
Why are SEO tools important?
Because they provide you with a data-driven foundation for your SEO strategy. That way, you avoid shooting in the dark and thereby increase your chances of success with your SEO.
What are the best SEO tools?
There are countless SEO tools available for everything from keyword planning and content optimization to technical analysis and data analysis. In this post, you’ll learn more about Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Schema Markup Generator, and Thruuu—a suite of tools that can help you with every aspect of your SEO strategy.
Get help with your SEO strategy
A good start is half the battle. A bad start is… well, not good. If you don’t have the resources to develop a well-thought-out SEO strategy, we—as an SEO agency —are ready to help you get off to a good start on your way to higher search engine rankings.
You're always welcome to send me an email at seo@amplify.dk.
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Whether you're a generalist or a specialist in marketing, our experts have put together a number of helpful tips for you on our blog.
