An overview from Nate
I fell in love with content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) a decade ago. Truthfully, I found SEO out of necessity. At my first company, we desperately needed to increase our top-of-funnel awareness, but customer acquisition costs were stubbornly high, given our industry.
Over several years, we scaled SEO to become our No. 1 customer acquisition channel and a high-margin one. We published thousands of blog posts, drove hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, and purchased many SEO tools — some good and some not so good.
Having used almost every SEO tool over the years, I have some strong opinions. Here are a few of my favorite toolsets.
The Toolset to Start With
Before purchasing an SEO toolset, you’ll want to start with Google Search Console (GSC), which you can use to track the performance of your website in organic search.
GSC can be clunky, and getting the hang of it can take a couple of hours, but it provides a tremendous amount of information.
For example, in GSC’s Performance tab, you can track the number of impressions, clicks, and average ranking position of your pages:
If you’re just getting started with SEO, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve submitted a sitemap in GSC, so Google can more easily find and crawl your website.
If you’ve got a large website, you’ll definitely want to take advantage of the indexing section, where Google allows you to track the indexing of your pages or the lack thereof.
And today, more than ever, we should all be paying attention to the Core Web Vitals section which flags issues related to website performance — for example, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):
I’ve just scratched the surface here. You can do much more in GSC, including checking for security issues and manual actions, and reviewing external and internal links.
GSC is a great starting point; you’ll likely use this tool forever. Still, it’s fairly limited, especially when it comes to analyzing historical performance, and it doesn’t really give you tools for moving the ball forward — it’s largely for analyzing what has already happened.
If you want to take your company’s SEO strategy to the next level, I recommend supplementing GSC with one or two additional tools. Here are some of my favorites.
Types of Tools to Consider Buying
There are seven different types of SEO tools that you might want to consider adding to your toolset.
1. Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research is the process of uncovering which keywords people are searching for, how often they’re searching for those keywords, and determining how difficult it will be for your website to rank for them. There are a few different ways to do keyword research.
For example, you could use a tool like Positional’s Keyword Research toolset to identify long-tail or related keywords while doing your research. You could also use Semrush’s SEO Competitor Analysis tool to determine which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Keyword research tools will typically provide metrics like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords. You can use these metrics to prioritize keywords in your editorial calendar.
2. Keyword Clustering Tools
After you’ve built a long list of keywords, you’ll want to cluster them or, in other words, group them, when they should be combined.
Keyword Insights is a popular keyword clustering tool, but if you’d like to cluster keywords while you’re doing your core keyword research, Positional makes that workflow easy.
3. Keyword Tracking Tools
While GSC is great, it’s often hard to navigate, and it provides only so much historical data. Companies often use another keyword tracking toolset to get more granular and to keep tabs on competitors.
For example, you could use Positional’s Keyword Tracking toolset to track the performance of your website in search results, including tracking keyword movement over time. Or you could use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to track search engine results page (SERP) features, spot keyword cannibalization, and more.
4. Backlink Tracking Tools
Backlinks — hyperlinks from another website to yours — have always been important to Google and are core to its search engine ranking algorithm.
While GSC provides limited backlink data, most companies will need another toolset for tracking backlinks over time. For example, both Ahrefs and Semrush offer tools for tracking new backlinks and provide authority metrics, such as domain authority, to track the strength of the backlinks pointing to your website over time.
These tools will typically have lots of filters and export options, too.
5. Content Optimization Tools
If you create content — for example, blog posts — to rank for specific keywords in search results, you’ll certainly want to use a content optimization toolset. Content optimization tools use today’s top search results to develop suggestions for building the best piece of content or one that is likely to perform well in search engines.
A content optimization tool will provide suggestions that you can use to start writing a new piece of content or to rework an existing one. For example, when I start writing a new blog post, I like to run a report within Positonal’s Optimize toolset to get a suggested word count, a list of keywords that I should try to optimize for within my piece, and an understanding of which questions I should try to answer. Other popular content optimization tools include Clearscope, Surfer, and Frase.
These tools will then provide a score indicating how well your piece of content is optimized or aligned with what search engines expect for a given keyword.
6. Technical SEO Tools
Technical SEO is the process of improving your website’s structure and performance to make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your webpages.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, my advice would be to not worry too much about technical SEO. Most companies really just need to do the first two parts right first: the right keywords and great pieces of content
But as your website grows, or if you have a large website today, you’ll want to prioritize technical SEO.
There are several different types of technical SEO tools. For example, companies like Ahrefs and Semrush have site auditing tools that can identify issues and errors on your website. Positional also has a toolset for internal linking that can be used to identify strategic internal link opportunities in new and existing content.
And depending on the content management system (CMS) you’re using, you might want to install a native toolset to check for basic technical SEO issues. For example, if you’re using WordPress, Yoast is a very popular plugin for maintaining website health and for basic optimizations like setting title tags.
7. Analytics Tools
Driving traffic to your website from organic search is one thing. But ultimately, you’ll need to convert that traffic into revenue. GSC will provide high-level traffic data, but most companies opt for another toolset to track users’ actions on their websites.
Google Analytics (GA) is a popular tool for tracking website analytics and user experience. While GA4 can be hard to navigate, it does provide a lot of useful information and allows for the creation of custom reports.
PostHog is a helpful toolset for analyzing user behavior and funnels. HotJar is a great tool for heat mapping and click tracking. And Content Analytics from Positional is helpful for identifying which sections of your webpages are causing users to drop off and for scoring pages based on user engagement.
6 Tools That I’ve Personally Loved Over the Years
Here are a few of my favorite SEO tools. I’ve mentioned a few of these already, but they’re so good that they’re worth calling out here.
Positional
I’m biased as one of the co-founders of Positional, but I’m confident that our toolset will provide much of what your team needs.
Positional has a robust toolset for keyword research and tracking alongside a wonderful content optimization tool.
It also has a number of helpful features to use as your website grows — for example, its tool for internal linking and analytics. In addition, Positional has tools for competitor research, keyword clustering, detecting plagiarism, and even social listening.
Semrush
Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools, and rightfully so. It has many features and functionalities, including tools for keyword research, auditing, tracking backlinks, and more. In particular, its Traffic Analytics toolset is quite novel and helpful for analyzing competitors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another one of the most popular SEO tools available. If backlink tracking and analysis are important to you, I recommend Ahrefs as the best source for this data. I’ve found that it catches new and lost backlinks faster than any other toolset. Of course, Ahrefs has plenty of other tools, including keyword research and tracking tools, and it’s very popular with agencies. However, keep in mind that Ahrefs’ pricing system isn’t for everyone, and if you’re running a lot of reports, things can get expensive quickly.
Clearscope
If I weren’t using Positional’s Optimize toolset, I’d likely be using Clearscope for content optimization. Clearscope is one of the more popular standalone content optimization toolsets, and its makers have worked hard over the years to build workflows for content refreshes and analyzing content decay. If you have a very large number of content pages, Clearscope’s platform can help you monitor performance and identify which pages to go back to. However, given its usage-based pricing, things can get expensive if you’re trying to run a lot of reports.
Copyscape
Copyscape is a plagiarism detection toolset. If you’re hiring freelance writers, you’ll want to make sure that the work you receive from them is original and hasn’t been copied from another source. Copyscape is my favorite tool for plagiarism detection, and it’s very affordable. You might supplement Copyscape with an AI-detection tool like GPTZero or Originality.ai. However, it’s worth noting that the AI-detection tools are not 100% accurate and that false positives and negatives will occur.
Yoast
I spent the first seven or so years of my career on WordPress. If you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin. It provides tools for site auditing and internal linking and can generate title tags and meta descriptions on the fly. It also has tools for redirects, keyword optimization, and more.
Regardless of your tool stack, just remember that building and scaling your SEO channel takes time. However, over the long run, SEO can become a valuable and recurring revenue source for your business. Hopefully, one or two of these toolsets will help make your life easier and get your website moving up on SERPs faster.