You Ask, I Answer: Recommended SEO Tools?

In today's episode, Paul asks, what is your favorite slash most cost effective software for managing SEO? Keywords, tracking competitors, etc. Good question. Uh this is going to be one of those topics where there's a whole bunch of people who have their own preferred tool based on their workflow and their needs. So my opinion here is just that it is opinion.

It is unique to the way that I work and the work that uh Trust Insights does. It is not a universal answer. So you should. My personal opinion again is that you should try to do the 30-day trial of all the tools on the market, see which one fits your needs and workflows best, and then make a purchase decision after that. Because almost all the major vendors offer you a some sort of free trial, seven-day, fourteen-day, thirty-day, whatever.

Um my personal favorite is a tool called RF. So let's flip this around here. But most important for me and the work that I do is data export. It's data export is some of the richest and the most generous on the market, which means that uh again for the work that I do, the kind of work that I do, uh, it is ideally suited. Being able to export tens of thousands of lines of data is important to me.

It may not be important to you. So this is a quick look at the tool. You can see there's like eight different sections up here, and I'll uh I'll cruise through these relatively quickly so that you can get a sense of what the tool does. Of course, there's the usual rankings, the the new and lost uh domains. This tells you that uh right here in in 2019 has been a busy, busy year for uh this is my personal website.

Some of the tools that I find very useful in here. Uh one is top pages, uh, the second is content gap, and the third is top content. So top pages tells you unsurprisingly what pages are getting uh comprise the majority of the traffic on your website. This is a useful report to know, not only because you want to get the traffic, but also you can see the keywords that those pages are ranking for and uh what position and ranking that they have. So there's uh obviously a whole bunch of stuff in here.

This is useful if you're gonna be doing like um some statistical analysis, you want to see what do the top pages have in common, and the data export on this one is fantastic. Content gap is really powerful. I like it a lot because it lets you analyze uh terms that competitors rank for that you do not, and that in turn means gives you a a work back plan. So let's let's put in uh my company website, trustinsites.ai, let's put in our uh news service, and let's put in my podcast, Marketing Over Coffee, and uh say at least one that you should rank in the top ten. Now, what this is going to do, this is going to come up with uh terms where there are other uh ranks.

So if this was a a site that I wanted to compete against, I would want to find ways to to rank for these terms. So let's add in let's add in one more target here. Let's add in uh toward data science dot com. That's a good one. Uh can't remember if it's I think it's plural towards now.

These are all the terms that any of these sites rank for in the top at least one in the top ten that I my website does not. So these are the terms that I should be creating content for, like Monte Carlo simulation, principal component analysis things uh that my competitors competitors uh are ranking for. So if you put in your company and at three of your your target companies, guess what? You're gonna come up with a rich keyword list of things that you need to start creating content around. Now, this is not enough alone.

You need to then do your own analysis on these keywords to see uh are there opportunities where your competitors are weak but you are strong that and that have high have high volume. Top content, no surprise here. One thing is really nice is you can get some social shares, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest that you cannot get uh out of some other applications now. A lot of other companies have gotten very restrictive about uh social share data, so you can get some nice social sharing data uh as well as a little bit of search data in here. But top content, very very useful.

Next up in the tool is content explorer. This one is really powerful. If you're familiar with Buzz Sumo, uh, this is essentially a replicated version of that, but it offers an SEO angle to it. So, for example, uh instead of just top content, you can look at things that have working links in specific languages published this year, and again, this report will give you a sense of what's the most popular content out there uh on a topic. I chose machine learning, uh, and you can filter by the amount of traffic that a story gets, for example, and this again helps inform your content strategy.

What kinds of things do you need to create content about that are getting uh the results that you would like to get for your content? So very useful stuff. Keyword explorer, no surprise here. You put in your keywords, and it will come up with uh rankings for them, uh volume difficulty. Again, this is okay as it is.

You need statistical analysis tools to digest this down and turn it into something actionable, but this is where you get the raw data from. If you're like, where do I get keywords for my my topics? You can look at uh things like have the same terms as the keywords you've chosen and add them to your list. So there's a couple like here content strategy template. That should go in my content marketing list.

Actually, I was kind of surprised I didn't have that in there. Well, I do now. Um things that the terms that uh also rank for the terms that you search for, questions that uh people ask about your top terms. What is content marketing? What is why is content marketing important?

So very, very powerful for coming up with uh very quickly uh a lot of ideas. The rank tracker, this is the one that a lot of people really care about. Uh being able to see how your site is doing, what you rank for, and then what competing sites you can put up to five competing sites uh in your rank tracker and see how you're doing versus those sites. Um I put in for fun Mark Schaefer's blog, and there's a few different keywords here that I rank for that his site does not now. This is not broad, this is the terms that you specify you want to compete on.

So you have to use other parts of the application to identify what you want to compete on, and then you put it in here and you can see uh your rankings uh versus your competitors. Site audit, great, very powerful tool. You plug in your site, um, you authenticate that it is your site, and then you go and you crawl and you crawl and you crawl, and it tells you everything that you're doing wrong on your website, and then you have to make a decision whether or not you want to make changes to your site based on what it spits out, like uh what errors are there. Like I personally don't care about H1 tags because I know that my my theme template has them built in. Uh, and so I maybe I just need to go and fix up a couple of uh parts of the template.

One of the more powerful things of this is that you don't have to choose sites that you that you own. You can choose sites that you do not own, uh that you want to crawl. And for the most part, other than uh you know uh you know the larger sites on the web, you can pick that out. So uh I advise a uh content site called Narrative and uh narrative.org, and it has tens of thousands of URLs. I can crawl all those, albeit slowly, uh, and get an analysis of their of that site's content and what it's doing well or not.

Link intersect. There's three other tools link intersect, which tells you um how again how different tool uh uh where other sites are getting their links from that you're not uh so it's more of a a pitching list. If you want to go pitch sites, you can do batch analysis for like a 200 sites at a time, and uh compare domain domain level metrics as well. This is uh if you're familiar with Moz's domain tool, this is again is is very very similar. Looks at all those metrics.

I like RFs again. Rich feature set, a lot of capabilities. We raced through them in this video. Um competitor tracking, you name it, but more than anything, it is that data export that if you want to use this data in other ways, if you want to then extract the URLs for your top pages, pull the content out with a scraper, um, and do topic modeling of top content. This is the tool to use because you will get enough data that you can build a statistically reliable model.

Uh same is true for top content, top pages, top competitor pages. If you're not doing stats, this may not be the tool for you, not because it can't do those other things, the more basic SEO tasks. It doesn't very well. It's just that though the advantages for me, are really around that data export. So do your demos, do your trials, uh, look at the pricing models, look at the features you want.

I would strongly suggest doing a features requirement list first before you doing the trial so that you can see, okay, does it have these things that we desperately need? That's re the most important. So great question, Paul. Uh leave your follow-ups below. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter, and I'll talk to you soon.

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