These are the top 10 best SEO tools for digital publishers to use right now
Everything can change in an instant. Each time Google updates its search algorithm, digital publishers get a little nervous while they wait for the fallout. Never mind that the updates are often necessary to keep search results as relevant as possible, seemingly minor changes can still have a big impact on website traffic.
Unfortunately, publishers aren’t usually privy to the behind-the-scenes minutiae that goes into an algorithm update. Why is Google making the changes it’s making? How will those changes impact website traffic in the immediate term? What about the long-term outlook? How exactly does Google plan to evaluate websites to determine which sites will show up on the first page of search results for any given keywords?
Even the savviest SEO marketers don’t know the answers to all of these questions. Google intentionally maintains a high level of secrecy around its search algorithms. What savvy publishers and digital marketers do know about are the best SEO tools to use to improve any website’s ranking in Google search.
SEO tools are critical to a publication’s organic search strategy. They help publishers hone in on the elements of their websites that Google considers to be most important. In this blog post, we’ll focus on 10 SEO tools designed to help digital publishers analyze their websites like true search marketers.
Top 10 SEO Tools for Digital Publishers
1. Google’s Webmaster Tools
Google’s Webmaster Tools is the first place digital publishers should go once they decide to start focusing on SEO. Free to use and designed for basic website analysis, Google Webmaster Tools is built in a way that makes it easy for beginners to use. One of the most popular features is PageSpeed Insights, which measures the speed of any website or mobile website. With page speed becoming increasingly important for publishers, PageSpeed Insights is a feature that publishers will want to check out.
Cost: Free
2. Ahrefs
For publishers who need a little extra help with keyword research, Ahrefs is an advanced solution that’s worth checking out. Ahrefs examines a website and produces keyword, link, and ranking profiles, so publishers can make smarter decisions about the content they publish. The four main tools that publishers will want to use here are Ahrefs’s Site Explorer, Content Explorer, Keyword Explorer, and Site Audit.
Cost: $99 per month for the Lite Plan
3. Moz’s Pro Tools
In the website analysis category, Moz’s Pro Tools is one of the best solutions out there. This serves as an all-in-one solution for publishers who want to improve their ranking in Google search, with tools specifically designed to identify new opportunities in SEO, track website growth, and build custom reports. The Crawl Test tool uses Moz’s own web crawler to analyze up to 3,000 links on a given URL.
Cost: Free trial
4. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is probably the most popular of all the SEO tools for digital publishers who run their websites on WordPress. Yoast SEO walks publishers through every step as they optimize their websites for Google. Premium users can do keyword research in Yoast SEO. They can also take advantage of tools for keyword optimization and view page previews to see how their webpages will look on Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Like other SEO tools on this list, Yoast SEO will keep an eye on a publisher’s most important pages and send warnings when pages haven’t been updated for at least six months.
Cost: Free version
5. BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a link building tool for digital publishers. The web-based software helps publishers promote their content to build links and buzz. It’s widely considered to be one of the lowest-cost options for link building. Publishers can use BuzzStream’s tools to research potential outreach targets based on industry and manage all external communication surrounding the link building process.
Cost: Free trial
6. Check My Links
Check My Links is a broken-link checker extension that reporters and editors can use to find errors in their articles before they go live. Check My Links highlights all the working links on a page in green and all the broken links in red. This makes it easy for reporters to make sure the links on all article pages are working before they click “publish” and it increases the chances of articles ranking highly in Google search results.
Cost: Free
7. SEMrush
SEMrush is an online visibility management platform that works differently from other SEO tools on this list. Designed primarily for publishers wanting to do keyword research, SEMrush has developed an incredibly detailed dashboard where publishers can view metrics about all the pages on their websites. One of SEMrush’s most popular features enables users to plug in a webpage to see what keywords that webpage is ranking for. Users can also see the monthly search volume for those keywords. Publishers can use SEMrush to compare their site performance with competitors’ websites and analyze backlinks from other websites to their own.
Cost: Free
8. All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is another plugin designed for publishers on the WordPress platform. This has many of the same features as Yoast SEO, but it’s more customizable. Publishers can use the All in One SEO Pack to edit robots.txt files, edit .htaccess files without FTP, and block “bad bots,” including referral spam. All in One SEO Pack offers support for Google AMP and Google Analytics, as well as support for SEO on custom post types.
Cost: Free
9. Remove’em
Remove’em is a backlink removal tool. It offers monitoring and service for penguin recovery that automatically gets link data from major providers like Moz and Ahrefs to uncover bad links. Remove’em offers self-serve tools and expert help, for publishers who need additional assistance in handling the clean up of bad links pointing to their website. It also provides publishers with campaign tracking tools to measure everything from link quality and scoring to contact completion and third party verified reports.
Price: $99 per month
10. Linkody
Linkody’s backlink tracker is an incredibly accurate way to understand the performance of off-page SEO. Publishers who need monitoring tools to manage their link building campaigns can use Linkody as they discover, track, and even “disavow” backlinks from third-parties. Linkody also checks a publisher’s links and sends instant notifications when links get lost or broken. Linkody is designed in a way that makes it easy for anyone to use.
Cost: Free trial
To learn more about SEO, check out Web Publisher PRO’s Comprehensive SEO Checklist for Digital Publishers.