Top 10 Technical SEO Tools To Help You Grow Your Business in 2019

There are now more than 1.5 billion sites online.

So how do you make your site stand out against all this competition?

When it comes to search engine optimisation, it pays to be as thorough as you can.

Luckily, there are some great technical SEO tools out there to help you with that. In this post, we’ll look at the top 10 technical tools to use in 2019, what they can do for your site and how they can grow your business.

 

Why use SEO tools?

SEO is one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site, which in turn means more leads, products sold and ultimately leads to business growth.

 

 

A few years ago, good SEO was not much more than a matter of including relevant keywords which users were searching for.

Not anymore!

Improving search rankings now means taking into account a range of factors, including a broad range of technical aspects (SSL to sitemaps), on-page aspects (readability, value, quality, keywords etc.) and off-page aspects (backlinks and social engagement).

 

 

Search engines like Google are getting smarter (and evolving constantly) meaning that there are more and more things to keep track of when it comes to search engine optimisation. In our business, we understand the importance of SEO to bring traffic to your site, and how complex it can be to do so.

Using the right SEO tools can help you to keep on top of all of these factors, and position yourself ahead of the competition. Taking advantage of good SEO tools to optimize your site is essential for small businesses, and anyone involved in digital marketing, or really anyone with a business!

 

Technical SEO tools can help you to navigate the complex search engine landscape, put you at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) and make you stand out against your competitors, ultimately making your business more successful. Consulting with experts can also be highly beneficial to support you in this process – you can learn more about our services in SEO and digital marketing here.

What are the best SEO tools in 2018?

SEO Tool #1: Ahrefs

Extremely popular with SEO companies, Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO support and analysis tool. Not only does this SEO tool allow you to conduct keyword research to help you to optimise your site, it also has a highly-regarded site audit function which will tell you what you should address in order to better optimise your site, making this one of the top SEO tools for digital marketing.

In particular, Ahrefs has a useful competitor analysis function which lets you analyse other leading sites, including using top ranked pages to reverse engineer keywords, which is information you can then use to build an optimised site. This SEO tool has the largest database of backlinks of any SEO tool, allowing it to show you which content in your niche currently has the most backlinks.

Having all these functions integrated in one tool means you can improve your site without having to consult multiple tools, therefore freeing you up to focus on other aspects of running your business and making it successful. Ahref’s site audit will make you aware of areas you may be falling behind, therefore helping you improve you SEO without needing to spend time researching and building up detailed technical knowledge yourself. Finally, its competitor analysis functions let you position yourself in the market, become a market leader, and ultimatley grow your business. For HQ SEO, this is one of our favourite tools and helps us during our technical SEO audit and on page optimisation processes.

SEO Tool #2: Screaming Frog

Another SEO company favourite and overall great online SEO tool, Screaming Frog takes a look at your site through the lens of a search engine, so you can drill down into how your site appears to Google and others and address any deficiencies. Extremely fast in performing site audits, Screaming Frog has free and premium versions, making this one of the best SEO tools for small business.

It analyses various factors to do with technical SEO including errors to fix, bad re-directions, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Status Codes and Robots Meta Data, as well as how to improve the site for link building. It then provides you the results in a spreadsheet report which you can filter to review the results more easily.

You can audit (or “crawl”) your own site or competitor sites for an overview of the market, allowing you not only to see what needs to be fixed but also identify which pages are getting the most traffic. You can also use this online SEO tool to extract various data from your site which can be useful for many marketing and business functions.

Screaming Frog is renowned for being faster than many other tools to conduct site audits, reducing the time you need to spend on auditing your site, and letting you get on with other important aspects of running your business. Additionally, being able to see what competitors are doing can be a good opportunity to get ideas for your own brand, and allow you to position your business ahead of competitors, while Screaming Frog’s traffic data results let you know which parts of your site get the most traffic, helping you prioritise areas to work on.

SEO Tool #3: SEMRush

SEMRush is an SEO marketing tool which allows you to check your site rankings, see if your rankings have changed, and will even suggest new ranking opportunities. It also has a site audit function which crawls your site to identify potential issues and delivers the results to you in a simple, user-friendly online report. The data can also be exported to enable you to view it offline and compile offline report.

SEMRush’s audit functionality includes and compares historical data, which allows you to review changes you have made to the site over time and assess whether these have improved your SEO (or otherwise). The tool also has a Domain vs. Domain function which stacks your site up against your competitors.

By being able to identify when changes have actually had a negative effect on your site’s SEO, you can quickly step in and address these issues to put your SEO on track and drive more traffic to your site.

SEO Tool #4: DeepCrawl

DeepCrawl has similar functionality to Screaming Frog, but with a more user friendly interface, especially for those without much, or any, technical SEO knowledge. Particularly, it can conduct detailed content reviews and tell you if you have duplicate content or pages, non-optimal content length, missing titles, non-optimised image tags etc.

This online SEO tool’s many features also include creating historical data by compiling and comparing search bot crawls, run multiple crawls at once, and find 404 errors. After conducting a site audit, the results are presented in a straightforward visual format of charts and graphs. DeepCrawl is particularly great for larger websites because of its number of features and ability to analyse so many aspects including content.

This is one of the best SEO tools for digital marketing because it is user friendly and easy to use – you can get results quickly and act on them without needing to fill up with detailed technical knowledge. The ability to analyse content means you not only improve site content but also readability, which can help with conversion rate optimisation (CRO) – that is, turning site traffic into new clients and actual sales!

SEO Tool #5: Google Search Console

Google may not be the only search engine out there, but it is certainly the most commonly used. Figures show that 3.5 billion searches are made every day on Google, with the search engine average a net share of 74.54% of all searches worldwide in 2017.

So it stands to reason that your SEO efforts should be focused at least in some part on optimising your site for Google specifically, and the search engine has their own suite of tools (previous known as Webmaster Tools and now called Search Console) to allow you to do just that.

Their tools allow you to “measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results”, including identifying issues linked to crawling, indexation and optimization issues. Although not as comprehensive as some of the other technical SEO tools out there, Google’s Search Tools are easy to use, and free. You do need to sign up for a Google account to use them, however.

SEO Tool #6: WooRank

WooRank is essentially an auditing tool and will conduct a full review of your site, reporting back on inefficiencies which you can then addressed and resolved. A great added feature of this online SEO tool is that it turns its findings into checklists which you can check off as you work on optimising your site.

WooRank has free and paid premium versions, but even the free version can be a great start in optimising your site. By helping you eliminate inefficiencies on your site, WooRank helps you to improving your rankings scores. And of course, taking advantage of the free version can help save costs which you can invest in your business!

SEO Tool #7: CORA

CORA is an advanced SEO tool which sits at the more technical end of the scale. This SEO software comes with a comparatively high price tag, but it allows you to conduct a thorough SEO site audit, measuring over 400 correlation factors related to SEO. In fact, CORA is probably the most detailed audit available, making it a good choice for  medium to large businesses, as well as any business with very specific SEO needs.

It should be noted that to get the most out of CORA’s reports and analysis you should have a better understanding of technical SEO. However, for the SEO expert, CORA provides a wealth of data which can be empirically measured to provide an extremely detailed analysis of any site.

By helping you understand your site performance in great detail, CORA lets you identify all weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. This gives you incredible opportunities to take your site to the next level, in order to grow your business. When it comes to an expert SEO audit of your site, another solution is to hire an SEO consultant – contact us to find out more about our SEO audit and other digital marketing services.

SEO Tool #8: Pingdom DNS check

Pingdom Tools offers an easy to use DNS tester which checks your site’s DNS health and identifies any warnings or errors. The tool is straightforward to use and only takes a short time to run a DNS check of your site.

DNS health is important because poor DNS can mean downtime and crawl errors, damaging your site’s SEO performance. By identifying and fixing your DNS issues, not only will you improve your site’s search engine optimisation, but this also guarantees a better experience for your users, meaning they are more likely to take the action that you want – whether it is to sign up to your mailing list, inquire about your business, or buy your product.

SEO Tool #9: Siteliner

SEO analysis tool Siteliner is designed to identify duplicate content. Siteliner checks your site to find duplicate content, as well as other factors which can impact your search engine optimization (not to mention readability) including page speed, average page size, number of internal links per page and broken links.

Duplicate content, or content which is the same as that found on other websites, is important to consider because it can damage you search engine rankings.  More than that, having strong, unique content is important to build your brand’s credibility, develop an audience and attract regular users to your site, which in turn can increase your client base.

Siteliner is a free SEO tool, with premium versions offering more features, meaning this could be a good solution for new entrepreneurs on a tight budget.

SEO Tool #10: GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free SEO tool which measures your site speed. This online tool checks over your site and reports back on site speed, as well as giving suggestions on what you can change in order to increase page load times.

Site speed is important because sites with lower speeds limit how much of the site can be crawled, effecting your search engine rankings. Of course, slower site speeds can also be highly frustrating to users! Having a faster site means users are more likely to stick around and browse through more pages on your site, and therefore more likely to take the action you would like them to take. In this way site speed is very important for conversion rate optimisation (CRO) as well as SEO.

Having your site optimised for SEO and CRO is a winning combination when it comes to driving traffic to your site, converting the traffic to actual sales, sales leads or clients, and therefore growing your business!

Conclusion: The best technical SEO tools in 2018

In the complex and competitive world of modern digital marketing and online business, it is critical to have the best search engine optimization, and therefore it is critical to take advantage of the best technical SEO tools available. There are many great SEO tools around, with a wide variety of functions, scope, cost and technical knowledge required to use them.

It could take some time (and in some cases money), for your business to use these tools to their full potential, but you will find that the results by far merit the effort in terms of increased traffic, brand awareness, sales leads, and ultimately growing your business.

Want to take advantage of tools like these to improve your SEO, but don’t have the time, knowledge or resources to do so? Or do you simply want to take your digital marketing to the next level?

Learn more about our SEO services here, or get in touch with us to find out how we can help you to use SEO to take your business to the next level.