One of the daunting task for a blogger is selecting the right SEO tool for his needs. There are hundreds of SEO tools that you can choose from in the internet and each of them offers a unique service that bloggers can use to grow their site.
With so many options that you can choose from and the hefty price that you need to pay there are several factors that you have to consider before committing to pay monthly for their services. With that, we have listed down below all the factors that you should consider in choosing the right SEO tools for your site.
Keyword Research
This is the most important aspect why bloggers use SEO tools. The right SEO tool for you is the one that allows you to see the search volume, assess the keyword difficulty, know the CPC, and assess the intent for the keywords.
- Keyword Search Volume – This is the bread and butter of all SEO tools, this allows the user to see which Keywords have the most search volume that you can use for creating contents. This will help you find which keywords has more volume as compared with the other keywords.
- Keyword Difficulty – The assessment of keyword difficulty allows the user to see whether it is the appropriate keyword to rank for. This helps those who are just starting to start building authority on their niche by selecting lower keyword difficulty and high search volume.
- Cost-per-click (CPC) – This is the actual price that you may pay for these clicks based on the keywords if you are to bid on it.
- Intent – This is the assessment on the type of intent your audience might be looking using this specific keyword. There are some keywords which is transactional such as those that has “best” or “most”. The type of intent of the keyword can help you determine the type of post you can make around the keyword you research.
Topics And Idea Generation
The best SEO tool should help you find different variation of keywords and questions. On the same sample above, I just used the keyword “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” but the SEO tool showed me other related questions and keywords related to what I am searching for.
There are SEO tools that can help you find keywords related to each questions available in the internet. This can fast track your topic generation and be able to find specific keywords that you haven’t considered before and can rank for.
Backlinks Analysis
Many internet marketers believe that in order to create EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) you need to have backlinks (this is basically other websites referring to your site). This will show Google that your site is an authority since other sites are linking to you.
SEO tools that can give you an in depth analysis of backlinks allows you to optimize and build your niche authority effectively. You need to find a SEO tool that can provide your about these crucial information:
- Number of backlinks – This is the total number of links pointing to the site. Low number of backlinks usually imply that the site is not ranking well. (There are others marketers who doesn’t believe that backlinks is everything this may vary from marketer to marketer)
- Referring domains – This is the total number of other domains/sites pointing to the site. Most SEO tools also shows which sites are these. This can help you determine the sites that you can reach out for your link building process.
- Top linked pages – These are the pages on a website that get the most backlinks. This can help you see which page or content is ranking in terms of the numbers of backlinks. It can help you see other factors from the specific content why it has generated several back links that you can duplicate to your other contents.
If you wanted to learn more about how to establish EAT, check it here: How To Establish Authority From Zero?
Domain Authority Scoring
Domain Authority Score is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website can rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). This DA Score may range from one to 100, the higher the score the higher the likelihood of the domain to rank.
This can help you see which from your competitor is an authority at your niche. SEO tools should have this DA scoring to help you determine which are your ideal competitors as it can help you find keywords that they are already ranking and provide better contents.
Competitor Analysis
Using SEO tools for competitor analysis allows you to see how your competitors are ranking. The SEO tool will give you information that you can use how to outrank your competitors by understanding the following from your competitors:
- Keywords they are ranking for
- Contents that are delivering traffic
- Estimated monthly visits / Traffic
- Domain authority score
- Number of backlinks
Understanding your competitor allows you to generate contents that you can outrank them and to understand how other sites are ranking. This is important especially for someone who are building their authority on the early stage and in the process of creating a space on your chosen niche.
Competitor Discovery
Whenever you are looking at your SEO tools, keep in mind that each keywords you are searching can lead you to your competitors. Knowing who your competitor is crucial for someone who just started and will help you avoid specific keywords that your big competitor is already ranking for.
You have to learn the skill of generating keywords that are still untapped by your big competitors, usually these are the low ranking or low search volume keywords, to help you build traffic and increase page views on your site.
Site Audit
This is also a common feature that you can find from different SEO tools out there. This is important for you to see the technical performance of your site. This can help you fix/optimize the following on your site:
- Crawled pages – Knowing the percentage of contents that has already been crawled by google (this means that the page has been indexed already by google for its search engine)
- Errors/Broker links – This helps you see if you have any error on your affiliate links or internal linking. SEO tool is a good way of monitoring this most especially when you are already starting to have volume of contents on your site.
- Site Performance score – This is usually the overall technical performance including the speed of your site. Maintaining a good site performance score allows your audience to have the best experience and avoids any bounce from your site.
- Duplicates – Duplicate contents and/or meta descriptions, this can help you identify whether your site has so much duplicates that can affect the overall performance of your site.
Social Media Marketing Tools
This is the functionality of SEO tools which helps you schedule your content publishing of your social media. This can ensure that you are properly monitoring your contents effectively and consistently. This is a very good tool especially for those who are utilizing Instagram and Facebook as their marketing platform for their site.
This is not a very common feature for SEO tools and but other tools are now starting to add this functionality on their SEO, most specially the fact that there is growing traffic that you can get from different social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and others.
User-Friendly Interface and Resources
This maybe an obvious one but you have to consider which SEO tool is easier to understand. It is also crucial for an SEO tool to have its own libraries of contents and manuals that can help you search on a certain area of the tool if you wanted to further understand it.
This can help you make the most of the tool and have an in depth understanding of the all the data you are gathering from the SEO tools to effectively use at your advantage and ultimately increase the traffic on your site.
Pricing Plans
This is, I guess, one of the most common consideration that people has whenever they are choosing their SEO tools. It might not be that relevant for those who are already in this industry for quite some time but I believe newbie affiliate marketers or beginner bloggers should consider this. The following are the prices of the common keywords tools that online marketers typically use:
| SEO Tool | Plan | Price |
| Ahrefs | Lite | $99/month |
| SEMRush | ProPlan | $119/month |
| Ubersuggest | Individual | $12/month |
It may seemed that Ubersuggest has the most favorable monthly rate among the above SEO tools, you have to consider that it has its own limitations as compared to the plans that even big marketers i.e., SEMRush and Ahrefs. If you wanted to learn more about the features and comparison of these two big SEO tools, check it here Which Free Version Is Better To Use SEMRush Or Ahrefs?
Final Thoughts
There are several factors that you have to consider in choosing the right SEO tool for you. With that said, you only need to focus on the specific use that will significantly provide the desired output that you wanted to see. Find some time understanding the key features of the SEO tools before purchasing the monthly subscription.
Interested to know more about SEO tools? Check this content about What Can You Get From Semrush Free Version?